Lotus' failure was more because they failed to port to Windows, betting instead on OS/2.
Lotus was at a crossroads. DOS was obsolete, was the future OS/2 or Windows? They chose OS/2.
Lotus was a big, cash rich company at the time. Their fatal error was not realizing they should have ported 1-2-3 to both OS/2 and Windows. Then they would have been secure regardless of which prevailed.
At that point(1989), the future was less clear-cut than Windows vs OS2. Windows was more a graphical shell for DOS than a real OS, and there were other graphical shells for DOS. From the top of my head: I vaguely remember GEM, I have used one from Tandy. There was something else installed on our school computers, Dynamic Environment or something . Windows before 3.0 (1990) was inferior to a lot of these DOS shells.
If the choice was between 2 options, 'both' might be a viable response. But 3 or more, especially with a market expectancy that everything DOS-based would disappear?
You may be thinking of DesqView? It provided some level of virtualisation and multi-tasking, if you had a competent-enough CPU. Eventually, there was also DesqView/X which allowed you to export DOS and DesqView-aware applications over X11, which was actually kind of cool.
Right, and Microsoft was still putting so much development work into OS/2 in 1989 that there was still some sort of feeling that OS/2 was possibly the future of Windows. (OS/2 development kits were shipped from Microsoft with Microsoft branding prominently on them right up until the OS/2 3.0 [WARP] split and the origins of Windows NT.)
In hindsight it is much more obvious that Microsoft's involvement in OS/2 was something of a trojan horse to fund early NT development and a short-term hedge in case people did trust the IBM brand more than the Microsoft brand, but at the time it was much more confusing.
> Lotus was a big, cash rich company at the time. Their fatal error was not realizing they should have ported 1-2-3 to both OS/2 and Windows. Then they would have been secure regardless of which prevailed
That’s...optimistic. The transition to GUIs undermined a major hold they had, which was user-familiarity-lock-in. That transition was going to be an opening no matter what, especially for a competitor that also controlled the platform that won out underneath the application.
Lotus bet the farm on OS/2. Not being on Windows made it an easy decision for customers to buy Excel.
Lotus was bigger than Microsoft for most (all?) of the 1980s.
Wordstar was another company that failed to understand the shift to GUIs.
Of course, Wordstar had another major marketing problem. Despite its dominance, nobody knew the name of the company (MicroPro) that made it. Far too late they realized the mistake and changed the company name to Wordstar. Microsoft never made that mistake.
Windows Mobile - iPhone
Tablet PC - iPad
Internet Explorer - Google Chrome
MSN Messenger - Facebook Messenger, iMessage, etc
Microsoft Band - Apple Watch
Zune Pass (2006) - Spotify (2009, 2011), Apple Music, etc
Skype - Zoom
Hotmail - Gmail
Windows Mobile may have been there before iOS but it came after Blackberry and palm. iOS and iPhone was also revolutionary. Smartphones changed substantially from that.
Internet Explorer wasn't the first browser on the market but by the time Chrome had come around Microsoft had let it languish and it became pretty awful. For a long time Microsoft had convincingly won the browser war.
Same with MSN messenger, it didn't keep up. And nobody has ever decisively won that chat app war anyways .
Smartwatches have been around for a very very long time. What Apple did was get smartphone integration right.
Zune Pass isn't a streaming service, its a DRM laden online music store. So more akin to iTunes than Spotify or Apple Music. And it was very late to the game.
Lotus was at a crossroads. DOS was obsolete, was the future OS/2 or Windows? They chose OS/2.
Lotus was a big, cash rich company at the time. Their fatal error was not realizing they should have ported 1-2-3 to both OS/2 and Windows. Then they would have been secure regardless of which prevailed.