Editing Infocom (section)

===Cornerstone===
Despite their success with computer games, Vezza and other company founders hoped to produce successful business programs like [[Lotus Development]], also founded by people from MIT<ref name="wilson199111">{{cite news |url=http://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/index.php?year=1991&pub=2&id=88 |title=A History of Computer Games |work=Computer Gaming World |date=November 1991 |accessdate=November 18, 2013 |author=Wilson, Johnny L. |page=10}}</ref> and located in the same building as Infocom. Lotus released its first product, [[Lotus 1-2-3|1-2-3]], in January 1983; within a year it had earned $53&nbsp;million, compared to Infocom's $6&nbsp;million. In 1982 Infocom started putting resources into a new division to produce business products.{{r|maher20130320}} In 1985 they released a [[relational database|database]] product, ''[[Cornerstone (software)|Cornerstone]]'', aimed at capturing the then booming database market for small business. Though this application was hailed upon its release for ease of use, it sold only 10,000 copies; not enough to cover the development expenses.<ref name=briceno2000/>

The program failed for a number of reasons. Although it was packaged in a slick hard plastic carrying case and was a very good database for personal and home use, it was originally priced at [[United States dollar|USD]]$495 per copy and used copy-protected disks. Another serious miscalculation was that the program did not include any kind of [[scripting language]], so it was not promoted by any of the database consultants that small businesses typically hired to create and maintain their DB applications. Reviewers were also consistently disappointed that Infocom—noted for the natural language syntax of their games—did not include a natural language query ability, which had been the most anticipated feature for this database application. In a final disappointment, ''Cornerstone'' was available only for [[IBM PC]]s; while ''Cornerstone'' had been programmed with its own virtual machine for maximum portability, it was not ported to any of the other platforms that Infocom supported for their games, so that feature had become essentially irrelevant. And because Cornerstone used this virtual machine for its processing, it suffered from slow, lackluster performance.<ref name=briceno2000/>