Editing Mitch Kapor (section)

===Lotus===
Kapor and his business partner [[Jonathan Sachs]] founded Lotus in 1982 with backing from [[Benjamin M. Rosen|Ben Rosen]]. Lotus' first product was presentation software for the [[Apple II]] known as Lotus Executive Briefing System. Kapor founded Lotus after leaving his post as head of development at [[VisiCorp]], the distributors of the [[VisiCalc]] [[spreadsheet]], and selling all his rights to VisiPlot and VisiTrend to VisiCorp.

Shortly after Kapor left VisiCorp, he and Sachs produced an integrated spreadsheet and graphics program. Even though IBM and VisiCorp had a collaboration agreement whereby VisiCalc was being shipped simultaneously with the PC, Lotus had a clearly superior product. Lotus released [[Lotus 1-2-3]] on January 26, 1983. Its name referred to the three ways the product could be used: as a spreadsheet, graphics package, and [[database manager]]. In practice, the latter two functions were less often used, but 1-2-3 was the most powerful spreadsheet program available.

Lotus was almost immediately successful, becoming the world's third-largest microcomputer software company in 1983 with $53 million in sales in its first year,<ref name="caruso 19840402">{{cite news | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=kC4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA80 | title=Company Strategies Boomerang | work=InfoWorld | date=1984-04-02 | last=Caruso | first=Denise | pages=80–83}}</ref> compared to its business plan forecast of $1 million. Jerome Want says:

<blockquote>Under founder and CEO Mitch Kapor, Lotus was a company with few rules and fewer internal bureaucratic barriers... Kapor decided that he was no longer suited to running a company, and [in 1986] he replaced himself with [[Jim Manzi]].<ref>{{cite book|author=Jerome H. Want|title=Corporate Culture: Illuminating the Black Hole|publisher=Macmillan|url=https://archive.org/details/corporateculture0000want|url-access=registration|year=2007|page=[https://archive.org/details/corporateculture0000want/page/55 55]|isbn=9780312354848}}</ref></blockquote>