Lotus Improv

I realized on my drive to work this morning that I’d let an anniversary slip by without comment. Ten years ago last month Lotus Improv was cancelled. I was a developer on the project so obviously I wasn’t too happy. Improv was the reason I joined Lotus in the first place. And customers missed out on a great product. Improv 3.0 had a lot of new features and was on a 32-bit platform again. (Improv 1.0 was on NeXT, 2.0 and 2.1 were on Windows 3.1).

Ten years later not much has changed in the spreadsheet world. Microsoft Excel dominates the market (although OpenOffice Calc is quite nice and free too). Excel has more bells and whistles than it had back in 1994 but it’s fundamentally the same application. There are fancier financial modeling tools but the average spreadsheet user is stuck with the same old two-dimensional grid of cells that Dan Bricklin first conceived for VisiCalc. This is fine for simple models but it starts to break down as things get more complex. This where Improv really shines. Even now, more than ten years since the last release, it’s easy to find praise for Improv.