It just doesn't make sense," Norman said. "IBM is not going to close the Boca site and shift workers around. Jim Norman, an industry analyst in Alexandria, Va., said both companies should benefit from their recent marriage. We build operating systems and they build applications," Schwarz said. "I don't expect the merger to have a material impact on our operations.
John Schwarz, vice president and director of the IBM programming center in Boca Raton, said Lotus and IBM will continue to operate separately.
#Lotus computer program software#
"With IBM's track record in the software business, Lotus may be just another doomed company caught up in the bureaucracy of IBM," Wong said.
#Lotus computer program Pc#
To make the merger work, IBM should transfer all of its software marketing and product management to Lotus because Lotus has superior marketing skills in PC software, he said. Wong with Dataquest thinks IBM's Personal Software Products group might disrupt Lotus with unnecessary requests to aid its struggling OS/2 operating system. A glitzy $50 million ad campaign featuring computer-savvy nuns and sheep herders portrays OS/2 as being popular worldwide. Since then, OS/2 Warp has been IBM's most successful version, shipping 2.5 million copies. It has shipped about 9 million copies of OS/2, mostly marketed to its large corporate customers It wasn't until last October that most consumers started hearing of OS/2 when IBM rolled out its latest version called Warp, a Star Trek reference to its fast speed. Since then, IBM has been trying to get back into the software operating systems game by spending millions to develop versions of OS/2. Originally, OS/2 was a joint project with Bill Gates and Microsoft in the early 1980s, but the relationship soured in 1991 and Gates went on to develop Microsoft's Windows, capturing about 90 percent of the market for operating systems with 70 million copies in use.
The future of computing has been going the way of the PC for years and, historically, IBM has floundered when it comes to personal computer software, according to a report by Karl Wong, a computer industry analyst with Dataquest, a San Jose, Calif.-based market research firm. Others say IBM might cut back on its investment in OS/2 within a year and divert most of the money spent on OS/2 to Lotus' programs. Some analysts say the merger will increase the clout of IBM's software division and OS/2, which competes with Microsoft's Windows. Almost all of the site's 2,700 employees develop software programs, including IBM's PC DOS 7 and OS/2 Warp operating systems that run PCs and determine how other programs perform.Ībout 1,700 local employees exclusively develop, market and support OS/2 software along with 1,500 employees at IBM's Personal Software Products in Austin, Texas. Just what IBM's merger with Lotus means to its 2.5-million-square-foot software development lab in Boca Raton is unclear. IBM also gets Lotus cc:Mail, the top-selling package for electronic mail, and Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program. It allows groups of people to work together electronically and store their work in central computers where others can view and work on it within the organization. The merger, completed last week, gives IBM Lotus' Notes software program, considered a major challenge to Microsoft. has helped give the company the lead in the new era of network computing. While Microsoft's sales target personal computers, IBM has been slower to penetrate that market with most of its sales coming from software programs running on mainframes and minicomputers.īut International Business Machines Corp.'s recent $3.5 billion buyout of Cambridge, Mass.-based Lotus Development Corp. Big Blue sold $11 billion worth of software last year - almost double Microsoft's sales.
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