Little known fun-fact re Lotus 1-2-3 was that it came on a ROM cartridge for the PCJr. The PCJr was a total sad sack of a machine. Technically superior to the PC and cheaper too so IBM intentionally crippled it with incompatibility bugs so that businesses could not really rely on it.
BUT they did release Lotus 1-2-3 for it in on a ROM cartridge which in the days when most programs ran on 5.25 inch floppies meant that performance just cranked!
Really? I remember it having a "chiclet" keyboard that was widely criticized among other things. As for the compatibility, I'm not sure how many computer makers at that time--including IBM--completely grokked that PC compatibility really did mean 100% compatibility as opposed to mostly compatible.
The keyboard was awful but it was more graphically and audibly better than the IBM PC. The "Tandy" graphics mode in old PC games is really PC Jr. graphics mode as Tandy cloned it. Processing powerwise a 286 AT from the same time frame would have been better.
For the home market where the Jr. was aimed it really needed the better graphics and sound to compete with the C64 and the like.
Well, it was newer and aimed at the home market--and IBM didn't worry too much about compatibility for whatever reasons (good or bad). PC compatibles didn't have decent standard graphics until EGA came along (though many systems would support Hercules for monochrome graphics).
But to your basic point. Yeah. IBM wanted to create a competitor to the other home computers. Not cannibalizing its business computers was probably a rather secondary concern.
The PCjr had the promise of "runs some PC software", so if Dad needs to finish his spreadsheet from the office in an emergency, he can barge the kids off the PCjr for the night.
If it had been something different to the point of total incompatibility, why not buy the kids a cheaper Atari 800XL or C64 for games and "educational software" instead?
You can also argue that the PCjr's unique features did survive a bit longer, in the form of the Tandy 1000 series.
Boca was sort of a skunkworks operation so I'm not sure it's fair to describe it as a bunch of business suits. But certainly in general, IBM had no real experience with the consumer market so it's not really clear to me what they were looking to accomplish with the PCjr. (Though I admit I'm not really familiar with its history.)
Refreshing my memory via Wikipedia the PCjr and AT did come out about the same time but the AT cost 6k in 1984 vs 1500 for the Jr. 6k in 1984 was around 12-13k in 2022 dollars.
BUT they did release Lotus 1-2-3 for it in on a ROM cartridge which in the days when most programs ran on 5.25 inch floppies meant that performance just cranked!