Remebering Lotus Development on its 25th Anniversary

What is it about Lotus that made it so special?  One day at work, I can remember one co-worker rattling off all of the things that Lotus was....a car, a position, a brand of toilet paper in France, a flower, a software company...but never the name of a product.  How many times while you worked there did someone come up to you and say "I use Lotus."  At one point in time, it meant that they used Lotus 1-2-3.  Around the time I left the company in 1996, it was starting to mean that they used, Lotus Notes.

I started working at Lotus after a company named Ashton-Tate bought DecisonResources, the computer graphics software company that I worked at.  Lotus had bought our main competitor, Graphic Communications, Inc. (where Lotus Freelance Graphics came from) a few months before.  My boss, Tim Davenport, came to Lotus to join the Freelance team, and I asked if I wanted to join Lotus as well.  When I came up for my interview with the team, I remember parking my car in front of a rusted out washing machine in the Lechmere parking lot (now where a major condo complex sits).

 In my first few weeks at Lotus, I went to a Pointer Sister's concert celebrating the 5th anniversary of the company and had all sorts of fun.  Of course Lotus was a lot of work too.  I learned a lot while I was there that I still use in my product marketing job today.  While not every day was perfect and not everyone I worked with was someone that I wanted to hang out with on a Saturday night, there were an awful lot of good times at Lotus.  We made things happen and sold a lot of software along the way. 

Don't know how many times I hopped on an airplane on a Sunday afternoon to head out to a trade show or as part of a field marketing job that I held in the Freelance group for a couple of years.  I saw a lot of the United States while on business.  And on one memorable trip - went all the way to Okinawa as part of a SmartSuite training trip for the U.S. Marines.  To this day, I've never had another experience where so many people called me "M'am" and offered to carry everything that I have with me.

There's no way to list all of the great people I met along the way and I've lost count of all of the products that I helped launch.  So, glad that I still get the opportunity to connect with a few old colleagues and friends today.   As important as it is to keep moving forward in our lives, it's nice to take a moment and look back every so often.