There were well-known problems with VisiCalc, and several competitors appeared to address some of these issues. This included the IBM PC when it launched in 1981, where it quickly became another best-seller, with an estimated 300,000 sales in the first six months on the market. VisiCalc's runaway success on the Apple led to direct bug compatible ports to other platforms, including the Atari 8-bit family, Commodore PET and many others.

The application was so compelling that there were numerous stories of people buying Apple II machines to run the program (see article Killer application). Compared to earlier programs, VisiCalc allowed one to easily construct free-form calculation systems for practically any purpose, the limitations being primarily related to the memory and speed of the computer. VisiCalc was launched in 1979 on the Apple II and immediately became a best-seller. IBM purchased Lotus in 1995, and continued to sell Lotus offerings, only officially ending sales in 2013. Lotus was surpassed by Microsoft in the early 1990s, and never recovered. None of the major spreadsheet developers had seriously considered the graphical user interface (GUI) to supplement their DOS offerings, and so they responded slowly to Microsoft's own GUI-based products Excel and Word. With the acceptance of Windows 3.0 in 1990, the market for desktop software grew even more. Lotus Software had their own word processor named Lotus Manuscript, which was to some extent acclaimed in academia, but did not catch the interest of the business, nor the consumer market. Lotus 1-2-3 was the state-of-the-art spreadsheet and the standard throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, part of an unofficial set of three stand-alone office automation products that included dBase and WordPerfect, to build a complete business platform. It quickly overtook VisiCalc, as well as Multiplan and SuperCalc, the two VisiCalc competitors. Lotus's solution was marketed as a three-in-one integrated solution: it handled spreadsheet calculations, database functionality, and graphical charts, hence the name '1-2-3', though how much database capability the product actually had was debatable, given the sparse memory left over after launching 1-2-3. With IBM's entry into the market, VisiCalc was slow to respond, and when they did, they launched what was essentially a straight port of their existing system despite the greatly expanded hardware capabilities.

The first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, had helped launch the Apple II as one of the earliest personal computers in business use. It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles in the business market. Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (later part of IBM). DOS, Windows, OS/2, classic Mac OS, MVS, VM/CMS, OpenVMS, PC-98, Unix, Linux

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