Business People

Ex-Head of Lotus Forms a Company

By David E. Sanger
The New York Times

November 18, 1987

A year after he left his post as chairman of the Lotus Development Corporation, where he helped to revolutionize the software industry, Mitchell D. Kapor says he is still nagged by the unnecessary complexity of current computers.

''Despite some striking successes, PC's are still very limited and hard to use,'' Mr. Kapor said yesterday. ''My mother still doesn't have a reason to use one. And too many people spend half an hour trying to find a file they wrote two weeks ago. It's obvious computers don't work the way people think.''

So yesterday Mr. Kapor, a figure who approaches cult status in the software world, said he was heading back to where he was in 1981: Starting a software company. His newest venture, only a diskette's throw from Lotus's headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., is ON Technology Inc., an unusual sort of software house.

Mr. Kapor, who is 37 years old, and his partner, Peter Miller, formerly Lotus's director of advanced technology, plan to develop what they call a new layer of software, one that runs in addition to a computer's operating system - which acts as the basic traffic cop of data.

This new layer would allow all applications programs, from word processors to data base programs, to monitor what the computer user does and to create short-cuts.

Mr. Kapor's program would use software technologies that have never been translated to commercial products. For example, it would create an ''agent,'' something like a computerized equivalent of a secretary or assistant, that would learn how the user stored files and make it easier to retrieve them by categories and subject matter.

The similarities between the early days of Lotus and the start of ON Technology seem scarce. When PC software houses were nearly nonexistent, Lotus started on a shoestring; this time Mr. Kapor has infused ON with his own capital ''in the low seven figures.''

And even with only three employees, the company has a different feel. ''Once you grow out of being a teenager you can never recapture the innocence,'' Mr. Kapor said. ''It is the same thing here. I feel a lot calmer, but there is still the same excitement.''

Mr. Kapor, who resides outside the Boston area, is married and has a son.

Copyright 1987 The New York Times Company