Back in the late 80s, Lotus faced a crisis with their spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3. Should they:
1. stick with DOS
2. go with OS/2
3. go with Windows
Lotus chose (2). But the market went with (3), and Lotus was destroyed by Excel. Lotus was a wealthy company at the time. I would have created three groups, and done all three options.
At the time, Lotus was a good company in great shape. The management could have hired people to get stuff done. In hindsight, sure, we can be judgmental, but it is still a failure in my view.
For a company selling licenses for installations, wouldn't having support for all available and upcoming platforms a good thing? Especially when the distribution costs are essentially 0?
This was pre-1983. Forking wasn't a thing at the time. Any kind of code management was cutting edge, and cross-platform shared code wasn't even dreamed of yet.
Apple had a skunk works team keeping each new version of their OS to compile on x86 long before the switch. I wonder if the Lotus situation was an influence, or if ensuring your software can be made to work on different hardware is just an obvious play?
