About
Founder's Story
The Creation of Lotus Japan
by Jack Plimpton
Lotus made the decision to enter the Japanese market based on the fact that Japan is the world's second largest PC market, and that Microsoft had developed a very lucrative but unchallenged monopoly. I was assigned to the project because of my experience on the Lotus Symphony Product Management team and total fluency in Japanese. After several fact-finding trips to Japan, it was determined that I should relocate to Japan. My wife and I had just bought a house, so after a combined house-warming and going-away party, we packed our bags for Tokyo.
On the technical side, resellers and opinion leaders told us that we would have to significantly modify the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application to fit the Japanese market. The resulting 1-2-3 Release 2J offered "spreadsheet publishing" features three years ahead of the Western version. Double-byte character support required a complete overhaul of the software. Japanese language input needed to be integrated with the program to maintain 1-2-3's intuitive ease-of-use. This was accomplished with the help of our development partner, Kanri Kogaku Kenkyusho (K3), from whom we licensed state-of-the-art Japanese language input software. Aside from K3's technical prowess, we were particularly impressed with K3's willingness to dismiss elaborate Japanese protocol and order bagels and hot dogs for lunch.
On the marketing side, I was charged with lugging a Compaq "portable" PC around Japan to gather marketing input on the product design. The result was increased upper body strength, and the killer ease-of-use which made 1-2-3 R2J an instant best-seller. Previously, businessmen had delegated the task of "what-if" analysis to assistants, shying away from keyboard input. In the advertising campaign to launch the product, we created a parody of a famous 1860's photograph of a missionary standing among his samurai pupils, with the title "software revolution." Truly, 1-2-3 changed how Japanese businesspeople work. The Japanese used to quip that a PC "workstation" should be spelled "walkstation" (both pronounced identically in Japanese) because it is in a shared area for secretaries. Thanks to 1-2-3, businesspeople realized they needed to have their own desktop PC's.
Negotiations with our Japanese distribution partners were a challenge. In one three-day negotiating marathon with Fujitsu, including three board directors, it took seven hours to agree to remove the word "totally" from a section in the contract (that's one letter per hour). Fortunately, Lotus' hard-working Japanese employees and consultants were always available. I actually first met our Japanese lawyers over dinner in downtown Tokyo on a Sunday night. Perhaps we could solve the U.S.-Japan trade deficit by importing surplus American lawyers to Tokyo! Softbank's Chairman Masayoshi Son proved to be a true visionary in committing to train 1,000 dealers throughout Japan in exchange for a six-month exclusive contract.
Other more mundane obstacles in starting Lotus' operations included finding Tokyo office space, and hiring 35 employees. With 150 corporate beta sites (including our bank, who I muscled into standardizing on 1-2-3 in exchange for Lotus' deposits), five books about 1-2-3 published at launch, and a high-profile office opening party complete with the blessing of a Shinto priest, Lotus was poised to take Japan by storm. A year after product launch, Lotus Japan grossed $10M in revenues and was profitable.
