zlacker

There was an article posted on HN a few weeks ago, about Excel's rise over Lotus 1-2-3.

Excel was acknowledged as a better software pretty early on, and could always import Lotus spreadsheets, but it really started gaining adoption once it was able to export to Lotus files.

Counter-intuitively, the ability to stay within the Lotus ecosystem (and switch back at any time) is what enabled a lot of people on the fence to try Excel out. Only once Excel became dominant did people actually switch to XLS files.

>>piaste+(OP)
Surely a main reason Excel gained market share was that it was graphical i.e. on Windows. Probably gained when OS/2 and Windows 3 came out giving a decent graphical environment.

I used Excel on Windows 2 from its release but I would be an outlier.