Lotus Cuts Back On SmartSuite Upgrades

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December 17, 1999 (12:00 AM EST)

Lotus is drastically scaling back development of SmartSuite, the company's struggling productivity suite, company sources said.

The move calls into question the future of the company's flagship product, Lotus 1-2-3, the original "killer app" of the PC era.

SmartSuite, which bundles 1-2-3 with the WordPro word processor, the Approach database, Organizer PIM, and Freelance Graphics, struggled against Microsoft Office.

Lynne Capozzi, vice president of the Internet Applications Division, said the company, responding to customer requests, is scaling back upgrades to SmartSuite, adding features and functions in incremental patches.

In addition, plans to add sophisticated data analysis functions, like those in the old Lotus Improv, to 1-2-3 have been scrubbed.

"Such changes would have changed the file format, and customers do not want that," Capozzi said.

With Windows 2000 coming out, customers do not want to deal with going out and "touching each desktop" with upgrades several times a year, she said.

Several Lotus sources said the company is putting SmartSuite into "maintenance mode," but Capozzi and John Throckmorton, executive vice president of worldwide development and support at Lotus, said features will be added, although not in the traditional point upgrade format.

Throckmorton said the company is moving assets and people around, depending on product schedules.

A second insider said the SmartSuite team has been cut from about 175 to 85 people and other groups inside Lotus are being encouraged to hire SmartSuite employees. Some key developers were offered significant bonuses to stay on the project until completion, but have not been promised employment after that, said another Lotus insider.

"The big thing here is not SmartSuite so much as 1-2-3, which was the seminal PC application," said a former Lotus employee.

"The word is there will be a year or so of maintenance and that's it, just like with eSuite," the insider said.

Lotus discontinued eSuite, a lightweight set of "applets," late last summer. At that time, personnel were reassigned to Internet applications, knowledge management, and other efforts.

Observers said Lotus failed to parlay its DOS spreadsheet dominance with 1-2-3 into Windows and never recovered.

For October software sales through corporate resellers, Microsoft Office held 96.9 percent unit share vs. 2.5 percent for Corel and 0.6 percent for Lotus, according to PC Data, Reston, Va.

"Office didn't win, Lotus lost," said Jeff Tarter, editor of SoftLetter. "Lotus concentrated on doing versions [of 1-2-3] for every platform but the two that mattered, Windows and Macintosh."

When Microsoft started pushing Windows over OS/2, Lotus, much like WordPerfect in word processing, committed to supporting the latter and was late to the Windows scene. In the meantime, Microsoft Excel became the market leader in Windows, and Office followed in its wake.