| Acquired by | IBM |
| Price | $3.5B |
| Date | 1995 |
| Website | lotus.com |
| Category | Enterprise |
| Employees | |
| Founded | 1982 |
| Description | Spreadsheet enterprise software |
Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) is a software company with headquarters in Westford, Massachusetts. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application, the first feature-heavy, user friendly, reliable and WYSIWYG-enabled product to become widely available in the early days of the IBM PC, when there was no Graphical User Interface. Such a useful tool certainly helped to spread the adoption of the PC, both for administrative and scientific applications. Much later, in conjunction with Ray Ozzie’s Iris Associates, Lotus also released a groupware and email system, Lotus Notes. IBM purchased the company in 1995 for $3.5 billion, primarily to acquire Lotus Notes and to establish a presence in the increasingly important client-server computing segment, which was rapidly making host-based products like IBM’s OfficeVision obsolete.
Source: Wikipedia, accessed 2/12/10.
