Lotus Development

Lotus Development Corporation was an American software company based in Massachusetts. Lotus is best known for the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application, the first feature-heavy, user-friendly, reliable, and WYSIWYG-enabled product to become available in the early days of the IBM PC. It became that platform's killer application and is widely considered one of the reasons the PC became successful. Lotus' next major success was 1989's Lotus Notes, a system that combined the features of email and groupware in a single product. Developed in partnership with Ray Ozzie's Iris Associates, Notes quickly became a corporate success, taking business away from older products running on mainframes, like IBM OfficeVision. IBM purchased Lotus in 1995 for US$3.5 billion (equivalent to $6.6 billion in 2025), primarily to acquire Lotus Notes. IBM maintained the brand and division, renaming it Lotus Software in 2003, until the 2012–13 time frame, although by that time only two products, Notes and Lotus Domino, were being actively marketed. Domino was a modernized Notes server with additional collaboration features that competed with products like SharePoint. Although successful for a time, on December 6, 2018, IBM announced the sale of Notes and Domino to HCL for US$1.8 billion (equivalent to $2.2 billion in 2025).