Buce Marjorie C

BSIM – OOA

SYSANAL

Case study

Mitchell Kapor

Cofounder, Lotus Development

Mitchell Kapor and Jonathan Sachs founded lotus Development in 1982.

Lotus 1-2-3, their spreadsheets software quickly surpassed VisiCalc to become the new industry Standard. The arrival of IBM PC opens the opportunity for Lotus 1-2-3.

Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston were developing VisiCalc. They introduce their Publisher to Mitchell and they want him to rewrite Tiny troll and clean it up so it can bring out as a companion product to VisiCalc.

Mitchell was inspired by VisiCalc but he want to try to do something that could stand up well. He faces a difficult decision. Since he was still studying and school was starting he decided to take a leave of absence from his school to finish the product.

Now he decided to tell to the publisher that he want to be a product a managers, the publisher then agreed to his ideas so he moved to California to finish what he’s doing.

He had done from writing and rewriting Tiny Troll, which was called VisiPlot. Then he came back and finished the product. It took him another six months before he finished it.

Bob Frankston develops the data interchange format and VisiPlot was a software application to support it.

Mitchell had an idea to less cumbersome but software arts either its publisher weren’t interested in his idea. And Software arts came to the point that they want Mitchell to be on them anymore so they decided to buy VisiPlot for $1200000.

IBM announced the IBM Pc in august 1981and it opens the opportunity to a better spreadsheet.

There was a set of ideas that gave 1-2-3 characters. It is a second-generation product that turned out to be Lotus 1-2-3.

Lotus went to public in 1983. Mitchell became a President and CEO from 1982 to 1986. IBM acquired lotus in 1995 for $3.5 billion.

Things that I’ve learned:

In every start up competitors are always there. Some start up succeeds and some are not. Like for the case of Software arts they become popular but it is like their rise when they fall. We need to be very creative and careful in every thing that we do. One idea is not enough.