Editing Lotus Software (section)

===Dominance===
[[File:Lotus_Symphony_Reference_Manual_(1984).jpg|thumb|A book of Lotus Symphony (DOS) Reference Manual, published in 1984]]
As the popularity of the [[personal computer]] grew, Lotus quickly came to dominate the spreadsheet market. Lotus introduced other office products such as [[Ray Ozzie]]'s [[Lotus Symphony for DOS|Symphony]] in 1984 and the [[Lotus Jazz|Jazz]] office suite for the [[Apple Macintosh]] computer in 1985. Jazz did very poorly in the market (in Guy Kawasaki's book ''The Macintosh Way,'' Lotus Jazz was described as being so bad, "even the people who pirated it returned it").<ref>{{cite web  |website=Cnet.com
|title=Mitch Kapor remembers Lotus' Macintosh bomb
|url=https://www.cnet.com/news/mitch-kapor-remembers-lotus-macintosh-bomb}}</ref> Also in 1985, Lotus bought [[Software Arts]] and discontinued its VisiCalc program.<ref>{{cite magazine  |magazine=Infoworld |date=June 24, 1985  |page=20  |title=Lotus acquires Software Arts
|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ES8EAAAAMBAJ}}</ref><ref>{{cite magazine  |magazine=Infoworld
|title=VisiCalc discontinued
|date=June 2, 1986  |page=8 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=SC8EAAAAMBAJ}}</ref> By that year [[Forrester Research]] considered Lotus, [[Ashton-Tate]], Microsoft, and [[Borland]] the "Big Four" of personal computer software.<ref name="forbes19851021">{{Cite magazine |last=Forbes |first=Jim |date=1985-10-21 |title=Corporate Mergers Offer Clout |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jy8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA24#v=onepage&q&f=true |access-date=2025-03-16 |magazine=InfoWorld |page=24}}</ref>

In the late 1980s, Lotus developed [[Lotus Magellan]], a file management and indexing utility.<ref>{{cite magazine
|magazine=Atlantic magazine
|title=Zoot! |date=August 1, 1997  |author=James Fallows
|url=https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/08/zoot/376931}}</ref> In this period, Manuscript, a word processor, [[Lotus Agenda]], an innovative personal information manager (PIM) which flopped, and [[Lotus Improv|Improv]], a ground-breaking modeling package (and spreadsheet) for the [[NeXT]] platform, were released. Improv also flopped, and none of these products significantly impacted the market.