Lotus Jazz

Lotus Jazz was an office productivity suite for the Apple Macintosh, released in 1985 for $595, after the substantial success of Lotus 1-2-3 for the PC. It was a commercial failure due to its low quality and aggressive competition. In the first month 62,000 copies were shipped and the following month 64,000 copies were returned, as bootlegged copies were sent back. John Dvorak called it "one of the great flopperoos in computing history" and said "Lotus made every marketing blunder in the book." Among them: overpricing it at $595, copy-protecting it, and "blunder of blunders, they named it Jazz instead of 1-2-3 for the Mac. This was a dubious decision based on differentiation nonsense." Lotus started follow-on projects, called "Modern Jazz" and "Mac 1-2-3," neither of which had the Mac "look and feel." Lotus cancelled Modern Jazz although it had already been announced. "Seemingly without a clue as to what the Mac was about, and without a successful Mac product to their credit, the Lotus team built in a DOS screen to allow DOS 1-2-3 users to use their familiar keystrokes."^[1]

References

External links

• Lotus Jazz overview