Ozzie Shows, But Doesn't Tell, At Lotus Soiree

Ray Ozzie came back to Cambridge this weekend.

But, unlike Mitchell Kapor, Jim Manzi, Frank Ingari, Deb Besemer and other big names returning for the Lotus 25th Anniversary party, he didn't speak.

Many took note of that. You could argue that Ozzie (or rather Iris) was always off to the side at Lotus. That was by design. But you could also argue that, after the 1-2-3 tide ebbed, by the time IBM bought Lotus, it was Ozzie's Iris that was the crown jewel.

So it was weird, for some, not to hear from Ozzie. There was a quick glimpse of Ozzie, now Microsoft's chief software architect, in the slide show.

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For some long timers the thought of Ozzie being Bill Gates' right hand man must seem odd, or maybe even grate. After all, Lotus (and Iris) battled Microsoft for years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were also partners but Ingari's remarks pointed out the bitter contention that fomented between Lotus and Microsoft. As in when Manzi passed Ingari in the hall, asking: "Do you know what your job is?"

A befuddled Ingari thought he did but Manzi reminded him. His job was to "kill Windows 3.0."

So enough with the coopetition talk.

Ingari, who went from touring the country in a van with his band, sleeping in state parks, to being an "old hand" Lotus exec in his mid 30s, played again Saturday night.

Other points of interest: Manzi said he'd had dinner with Steve Jobs in the weeks before event. Jobs, he recounted, said there were only two companies with the creative spirit that he saw at Lotus. You can probably guess the other.

Industry vets remember that Lotus developed Improv, the first pivot-table spreadsheet hybrid for Jobs' Next machine. A few years later, pivot tables were all over the place—Excel, 1-2-3 and (dare I utter the words?) Quattro Pro.

Glenn Kaufman recalled the Shadowram party right around when the Lotus-Microsoft-Borland spreadsheet fracas hit its boiling point. It was great to have independent confirmation that when Borland's Philippe Kahn entered the bar, Manzi literally hit the deck, saying "the room wasn't big enough for the both of us."

Later that night, Kahn and John Landry sat, huddled over a booth, talking (we all thought) about a possible resolution to the long-running Lotus vs. Borland copyright infringement suit. But the legal wrangle didn't end then and there. In fact it meandered all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court where the justices refused to hear the case. It was a de facto victory for Borland.

And, going back to the beginning, Kapor said his initial forecast for Lotus 1-2-3, the soon-to-be-killer-PC-app, was only off by 1,700 percent. He knows this because he calculated it on a spreadsheet.

Fortunately, the mistake was in Lotus' favor. Big time.

A star was born.