Lotus Development Corp is aiming for a revenue growth rate of 15% to 20% in each of the next few years, chief executive James Manzi told the Alex Brown & Sons Technology Seminar in Baltimore – and it has an operating margin target of 15% to 18% over the next few years; nevertheless, he said that while the company’s core desktop software business remains strong, growth is fundamentally slowing, and that future growth will be driven by software that provides communications and workgroup services to users of networks; Lotus expects to have 3,000 customers for its Notes workgroup software by the end of this year, up from 1,400 at the end of 1992, and he believes Lotus has on the order of a five-year lead over the competition on workgroup software; he was scathing about the prospect of a threat from Microsoft Corp, saying they have yet to establish themselves in workgroup or network computing, and that Cairo sounds remarkably like Notes v1, which we shipped back in 1989.
