On Sat, 7 Jul 2007 19:56:31 +0100, "Mart"
cquirke wrote :-

Lotus were "eaten" by IBM in a hostile takeover; I think IBM wanted
Lotus Notes and left the rest to crumble away.

Predators! Asset strippers??

Yup. About the only hi-profile "merger" I remember that didn't try to
hide behind brave spin paint.

Didn't Lotus buy-out Improv too, Chris?

I remember Lotus bringing out Improv as a hi-end alternative to 1-2-3,
and it had killer features that no-one could understand (at an
intuitive level) and use. A bit like pivot tables, that :-)

I wasn't aware that Improv was a buy-out but it makes sense; a lot of
work, a break in continuity (why not release it as a new varient of
1-2-3 as DOS-era 1-2-3 v3 was with v2.x) and a suspiciously short
product life span... yep, it all fits.

till got my original (very expensive) retail Lotus Improv floppies (1993)
and 'real' User Manual - those were the days when packaging was full.

Now, with the nadir of MS Office 2007 OEM, you just get an "air box"
without even the disks. Hard to see the "Genuine Advantage" in that.

Improv always seemed (to me) more intuitive than 1-2-3 and/or Excel.

Well, you saw how I bounced off it :-)

My fave was Quattro Pro, which did everything that 1-2-3 v2.x and v3
did, and did it all in 640k RAM (v3 needed 1M). It was only Excel's
"outline" feature (the ability to nest detail) that lured me off
Quattro Pro and into Windows (for spreadsheeting) and Excel.

Which meant I took my "admin" home, as that was where the only Windows
PC was (the "work" was various generic 286 DOS and PICK boxen, with
the cheap "auction special" 286s acting as "dumb terminals" for the
PICK box, using "Termulator X" I wrote in Assembler.

But then Lotus killed Improv.
Nothing new under the sun then?

Indeed, what happened to Borland, could happen to MS; killed by
complexity. It's to MS's credit that it is happening so many software
iterations later, but could still happen.

In th DOS era, MS was just another software vendor. Borland seemed
top of the pile, with excellent compilers and apps; the MS compilers
seemed a bit dull and runner-up in comparison. The driving force was
resource efficiency, i.e. whichever compiler rendered smaller and
faster code was generally seen as "better".

So, a very different landscape, compared to today, when the drive is
to create code that works and is not exploitable, and if it's big and
slow, the hardware will catch up, so that's OK.

I used to go to computer shows each year, and the running gag was the
same for years; "hey, have you seen the Paradox for Windows beta?"

Yup, Paradox for Windows was a bit like Vista, in that it was complex,
and forever in beta,. never nearing release, and was also pretty
buggy. Suddenly, "fast" wasn't enough; also, it seemed as if adapting
to Windows (which Borland embraced, compared to the Word Pervert
approach of ignoring and working around it) was a challenge that may
have ultimately defeated Borland.

The next thing, Borland had shrunk to a desktop organizer product,
carried away as hand luggage by the top brass as the ship went down.

Around that time, attention turned to "software engineering" and
"ego-less programming" (or "coding by committee", if you like. No
more room for maverick lone coders; the complexity was too much to
hold in one head, and the interfacing between heads became the issue
on which projects would sink or swim.

It was also the time of "object orientated programming", that merged
code and data into objects. That was a bad idea, and we're still
suffering from the fall-out today, even as we benefit from a
much-needd formalization of the dev process.

Once you let "data" tell you what to do, it's not your system anymore.



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