companies realized that it would be much more profitable to cooperate and join forces to make sure you all give out the most optimal user experience instead of trying to dominate a market by trying to do it all yourself. Sadly, even now 1-2-3 remains a better product than Excel, which is (like all Microsoft products) over-laden with whizzy new features that nobody asked for, and they never fix useability issues that go back decades (like Excel's crap charting, or basic input conventions of not recognising that when I open a spreadsheet and type 4+3, I am most likely to want that calculated in the cell, not entered as text, etc etc. Lotus should have avoided OS/2 like the plague that it was.
IBM LOTUS 123 PC
OS/2 was unpopular with most users and struggled for software, and backing an unpopular proprietary system from a single PC maker was always madness. OS2 never had any traction other than with a small number of IBM captive customers (the sort of people that bought in token ring networks and those crappy overpriced underpowered PS2 machines). didn't some of the banks run OS/2 internally?"
"I don't think you can punish Lotus for developing for OS/2. Thus I can't really comment on that, but it seems that the lack of usage of that particular feature is what gave us a better opinion on Notes. We never used the mail feature, which seems to be what everyone hated about Notes.
IBM LOTUS 123 OFFLINE
This was a killer feature in the era of 33.6k dialup internet I could bring my laptop on campus during our first days, jack into the campus LAN and replicate the whole semester's worth of databases (~400Mb, usually) and then do all my assignments at home, post them offline and just crank up replication, uploading only a couple Kb's worth of data over dialup. I found the whole database groupware thingy pretty interesting mostly the "replication" feature that allowed you to download the entire course database in one fell swoop, allowing you to work offline and just upload/download any changes later.
I used Notes at HighSchool and even my first college years because my university started using something called LearningSpace, which was based on Lotus Notes.