I don't know why Lotus ultimately killed it, but I can relate to you why we ditched it at our company.
For a couple of years before I joined the startup (this is circa 1994), *all* the documentation was done in Ami Pro - first in DOS and then in Windows 3.0/3.1. The president of the company refused to use MS Word; he didn't like the software and Ami Pro was working just fine.
I joined the company in 1994, and, never having used IBM PCs (I was an Atari devotee back then), used AmiPro everyday (writing design specs, memos, letters, etc. al.). It was very stable in Win3.1 and there was a large library of existing documents that we maintained, as well as the templates created for the company. It was pretty cool to not have to worry about the tool, and focus on the content of the document itself.
Then Windows 95 was released with Office 95 (as Chris pointed out in his blog). This was rather significant for Lotus AmiPro.
As a company, we hung onto AmiPro for another year or so. However, there came a time when AmiPro was just not keeping up with the technology. I recall that there was an issue with the font system or how we were using it (it's a bit blurry since it has been almost 10 years now). I remember having to install Adobe Type Manager along with some commercial fonts in order for AmiPro to be properly setup on a Windows machine. (A client insisted on specific Adobe fonts back 'in the day.')
At one point it became such a pain to sit there and install the software (I remember it came in on a *LOT* of 3.5" discs and I don't think that AmiPro3 was ever able on CD), that the President of the company told me find out what's available and whether or not to move to a new platform.
I got the latest version of AmiPro (I forget the version number) and Word, and a *key and critical* feature was how well either procesor would be able to import AmiPro3 documents.
Both processors sucked at importing AmiPro3 documents. The new AmiPro did a slightly worse job because it appeared that it was trying to understand the formatting, and the resulting document looked atrocious. The MS Word importer basically took the text and dumped it in the default paragraph style. Pictures were "around" the appropriate areas, but headers, footers and tables were hosed. Section styles and paragraph styles were hosed (although character styles such as bold, italic, and underline sometimes survived). Margins (especially for multi-column layouts) were hosed.
One interesting thing we observed was how the fonts for things like an 'em-dash,' the symbol for 'ohms' and the like were also hosed. However, if the character was re-entered into either program via the ALT- combo it would appear properly!
It dawned upon us that, at that point, we were going to lose our large library of AmiPro 3 documents and templates irrespective of the platform we selected. What pissed us off about Lotus was that they *never* came up with anything to convert Lotus documents other than that lousy import filter. If they had done that, we would have stayed a Lotus Smartsuite customer for a *long* after that.
Lotus is what killed this gem of a word processor for us.
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I don't know why Lotus ultimately killed it, but I can relate to you why we ditched it at our company. For a couple of years before I joined the startup (this is circa 1994), *all* the documentation was done in Ami Pro - first in DOS and then in Windows 3.0/3.1. The president of the company refused to use MS Word; he didn't like the software and Ami Pro was working just fine. I joined the company in 1994, and, never having used IBM PCs (I was an Atari devotee back then), used AmiPro everyday (writing design specs, memos, letters, etc. al.). It was very stable in Win3.1 and there was a large library of existing documents that we maintained, as well as the templates created for the company. It was pretty cool to not have to worry about the tool, and focus on the content of the document itself. Then Windows 95 was released with Office 95 (as Chris pointed out in his blog). This was rather significant for Lotus AmiPro. As a company, we hung onto AmiPro for another year or so. However, there came a time when AmiPro was just not keeping up with the technology. I recall that there was an issue with the font system or how we were using it (it's a bit blurry since it has been almost 10 years now). I remember having to install Adobe Type Manager along with some commercial fonts in order for AmiPro to be properly setup on a Windows machine. (A client insisted on specific Adobe fonts back 'in the day.') At one point it became such a pain to sit there and install the software (I remember it came in on a *LOT* of 3.5" discs and I don't think that AmiPro3 was ever able on CD), that the President of the company told me find out what's available and whether or not to move to a new platform. I got the latest version of AmiPro (I forget the version number) and Word, and a *key and critical* feature was how well either procesor would be able to import AmiPro3 documents. Both processors sucked at importing AmiPro3 documents. The new AmiPro did a slightly worse job because it appeared that it was trying to understand the formatting, and the resulting document looked atrocious. The MS Word importer basically took the text and dumped it in the default paragraph style. Pictures were "around" the appropriate areas, but headers, footers and tables were hosed. Section styles and paragraph styles were hosed (although character styles such as bold, italic, and underline sometimes survived). Margins (especially for multi-column layouts) were hosed. One interesting thing we observed was how the fonts for things like an 'em-dash,' the symbol for 'ohms' and the like were also hosed. However, if the character was re-entered into either program via the ALT- combo it would appear properly! It dawned upon us that, at that point, we were going to lose our large library of AmiPro 3 documents and templates irrespective of the platform we selected. What pissed us off about Lotus was that they *never* came up with anything to convert Lotus documents other than that lousy import filter. If they had done that, we would have stayed a Lotus Smartsuite customer for a *long* after that. Lotus is what killed this gem of a word processor for us.