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The 'DOS Ain't Done 'til Lotus Won't Run' Myth
Otter writes "We've all heard the story of Microsoft's battle cry of "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run". Adam Barr investigates the myth, interviewing various Microsoft and Lotus old-timers (including Mitch Kapor), and finds no basis for its legitimacy or any case of 1-2-3 actually not running. Whom to blame for Lotus Notes is not discussed."
I agree. I was at Lotus for quite a while starting in 1983. In the early days (1-2-3 v1 and v2, and MS-DOS 2.x and 3.x), Lotus and Microsoft were quite friendly, and we had NDA access to a lot of stuff from Microsoft, including MD-DOS releases. [I also saw early releases of Windows 1.x documentation and remember thinking how pathetic it was next to Inside Macintosh -- but that's a whole other story...]
Anyway... In the spirit of this "friendly" cooperation, I remember attending technical presentations from Microsoft about OS/2 Presentation Manager and how important it was for us to architect our applications in anticipation of OS/2 so we'd be ready when it hit the street; and feeling like we'd been had when Microsoft switched their emphasis from OS/2 to Windows 3.x, and had their applications all ready to go while Lotus was invested heavily in an OS/2 suite.
From that point forward, 1-2-3 was on the ropes vs. Excel and it seemed like every OS move by Microsoft with Windows kept us off-balance; there was also the issue that the Excel developers seemed way better informed about developing for Windows 3.x than the rest of us. There was wide speculation that Microsoft was publishing and encouraging the use of APIs that their application developers did not use. It was (and is) easily believable that there was a philosophy of "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run."
On another, contrary, note, I also remember (later) a page 1 Wall Street Journal article about the development of Windows NT under Dave Cutler. IIRC, one of the points made in the article was that NT had a huge team of developers (50?) adding code to NT that was conditional on the application being run; i.e., "if the current application is PhotoShop, perform this operation this way" for compatibility. It was presented as a representation of Microsoft's commitment to compatibility, but, IMHO, it's a shitty way to write an operating system...