Moose O'Malley's Software Valley Established : July 1996 Please bookmark this location only : http://move.to/moose

Moose's Greatest Products of All Time : Lotus Improv

Lotus Corporation are no stranger to spreadsheets, having produced the first killer spreadsheet for the IBM-PC, Lotus 1-2-3 - a product that went on to sell 10's of millions of copies around the world, and made Lotus billions of dollars in profit.

Indeed, Lotus would still be king of the spreadsheet on all Windows PCs today, if they weren't so slow moving to the Windows market. I'll speak more on that below.

Way back, in 1993, Lotus released a product that was so amazing, so revolutionary, so innovative, and so easy to use, that it made all other spreadsheets redundant dinosaurs overnight.

That amazing product was called Lotus Improv.

Fig 1. Front of Improv's box. Click the image or here for a full sized view.

Fig 2. Back of Improv's box. Click the image or here for a full sized view.

Improv had an interesting history.

In 1986, Lotus' Advanced Technology Group, including Pito Salas, Paul Kleppner, and Lynda Urgotis started with the noble mission of making spreadsheets dramatically easier to use, more flexible, and more adaptable to the user's needs. The group achieved a great deal, as we shall see below.

Then, in early-mid 1987, Pito Salas took a small multi-media demo of his "Modeler" program on tour to some of Lotus' largest clients and got rave reviews from them.

Lotus Corporation formally committed to the project in September 1988, and the "Modeler" program was code named "Back Bay"

The following month Steve Jobs visited the Lotus Corporation, and convinced Lotus Management to put Back Bay on Job's brand new computer, a black magnesium machine called the NeXTcube. NeXTs were a very decent, fast, and beautiful computer at the time (but mind-bogglingly expensive compared to a similarly featured IBM-PC), with a sophisticated NeXT Step Graphical User Interface and NeXT Development Environment running on top of a modified UNIX Operating System. But, they had virtually zero market share. (All up, only about 100,000 NeXTs were ever sold worldwide).

In February 1991, Lotus Improv v1.0 was released for the NeXT computer.

In 1992 and 1993 Lotus ported Improv to Microsoft Windows 3.1, and called the release Lotus Improv for Windows v2.0. (There was no v1.0 for Windows). The program had an introductory price of $129 US. (I was working in the UK at the time, and the introductory price there was 95 UK pounds).

In 1993, Lotus Improv was available on the Windows market. And, at that time, I received some junk mail inviting me to a Lotus New Product Seminar and was so fascinated by what the brochure said about Improv, that I went along to the seminar (in May 1993), and dragged a bunch of colleagues (from the client site where I was currently working) along as well, and we all saw Improv for the first time, and we all immediately fell in love with it. Especially me. At the end of the seminar, I purchased two copies of the program - at 95 UK pounds each.

At the time, I was doing a great deal of development work in a product called Holos. Holos enabled the creation and manipulation and reporting of data in massive multi-dimensional hypercubes. At the core of Holos were data dimensions and multi-dimensional data structures, with seperate Rule Tables for acting on this data, and a comprehensive application programming / development language based on C++ (but Holos was a lot more elegant than C++ - it was probably more like Pascal than C++).

Holos enabled development of very sexy user front ends, sophisticated back ends, and supported full client server development, databases, massive, high-dimensional, dense and sparse hypercubes of data, and featured truck loads of advanced features for data wharehousing and client side data entry and reporting.

Holos was a great product. But it was complex and very expensive to buy and use, and expensive servers (running Unix or VMS - I was expert in both OS's) were required to support client PCs running Windows 3. (Later on, there was a version of Holos for Windows NT, that allowed users to run the client and server ends of Holos on a stand alone PC and at a much reduced cost, but that was still years in the future).

And freelance Holos gurus / developers (like me) charged a premium for our services because Holos skills were in such short supply.

And, now here was Improv, a product that could do some of what Holos could do, and at a miniscule fraction of the price, and right on the user's own PC.

Improv was Amazing ! No, that's not fair at all, Improv was much more than that - Improv was Earth Shattering !!

Below are a bunch of screen shots along with descriptions that will walk you through the basics of Improv.

OK, this is what you see when Improv starts - a clean slate. There initially appear to be some similarities to normal spreadsheet programs, but looks can be deceiving ... Like, many other windows programs, there are menus along the top, speed button icons below this, and then we seem Improv's motif for a spreadsheet. For now, think of Category A, and Category B as the row and column headings. There is a lot more to Improv, as we shall soon see below.

In this screen shot, I entered "Jan" as the name for the first column, and then I clicked on this column heading and dragged to the right with the mouse, and Improv automatically filled in the "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", ... etc for other months. It's the little features like this that can mean so much.

In this screen shot, I entered "Monday" as the name for the first row, and then I clicked on this row heading and dragged down with the mouse, and Improv automatically filled in the "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", ... etc for days. At this stage, we still only have a 2 dimensional stock standard spreadsheet, which any other spreadsheet could have done almost as well. So, let's move beyond this, and make things interesting.

Here, I have added a 3rd Dimension - and called it Year - and entered a single item in this new dimension : 2002. I can add more years at the click of a mouse button. I have also renamed the row and column dimensions from Category A and Category B to Day and Month. So, now, we have a 3 dimensional spreadsheet. If we want to add a 4th dimension, such as Product (such as toaster, fridge, TV, etc), then we can do this just as easily. If we want to add a 5th dimension, such as Sale Person (with Mike, Cathy, Anita, Peter, and other sales people), then we can add this in easily as well. If we want to add a 6th dimension, such as Item (Sales, Costs, Commission, Net Income), then we can add this in easily as well. This would then give us a 6 dimensional cube of data. In fact, if we want 10 dimensions or 12 dimensions, then Improv will let us have that, with anything up to 1,000's of items in each dimension. I'll keep to 3 dimensions for now.

Now, finally, we are getting to the interesting stuff. Here, I have decided that I want the Years in the rows, so I drag the Year dimension down with the mouse and drop it to next to and to the left of the Days dimension. So, now we see Years, and then for each Year, we see Days of the week. Months are still in the columns If I had added a 4th dimension (such as Products) and we wanted to see Days for each Product in the rows, and Months for each Year in the columns, then we can rotate the view around with a few mouse clicks. If I had added a 5th dimension (such as Sale Person), then we could adjust the view to suit exactly how we wanted to see our data.

No matter how we want to view our multi-dimensional "Hyper Cube" of data, we can view it that way with a few mouse clicks. We can easily choose what dimensions we want in the rows and columns and in what orders.

This is the first amazing thing about Improv !

And, without further ado, let's look at the second amazing thing about Improv.

In normal spreadsheets, formulas are very obscure and contain arcane cell references. e.g. = A3 / $C55 * AB$43. Hardly "intuitive" is it ?

In addition, formulas in "normal" spreadsheets can only apply to a single cell. So, if you want to calculate a total for a range of rows or columns, then you need to copy and paste the formula to all of these cells.

In Improv, formulas are in plain English : Profits = Sales - Expenses, Year Total = SUM (Jan .. Dec), etc. Now, finally, we have a spreadsheet where formulas are easy to understand.

And, a single formula can be applied to single cell, or just as easily to a whole group of cells.

But, this is only just the start. Not sure what cells are calculated by a formula ? Simply click on the formula, and Improv colours all cells that are calculated with this formula. Not sure which formulas affect a cell ? Then click on the cell, and Improv colours all formulas that affect that cell. If several formulas affect a cell (such as where there is overlaps in totals calculations), then Improv colours all formulas that affect that cell AND especially colours the formula that is applied to the cell after all other formulas.

Pretty amazing, huh ? This is how spreadsheets should work - formulas in plain English, one formula can apply to one cell or a whole group of cells, formulas (i.e. operations) separate from your data, and you can view your data any way you want with the click of a mouse button.

In a word Improv was : Beautiful !

Development Tools :

Here is an example of what Lotus Script looked like :
(It's a sample of some of the many 1,000's of lines of Lotus Script code that I wrote back in 1993).

Also included with Improv was a dialog creating and editing tool, called Lotus Dialog Editor, so that you could create screens with checkboxes, menus, buttons, labels, etc. Back in 1993, a few development environments were starting to do this, but things were still pretty primitive back then. Drag and Drop development environments like Delphi and C++ Builder would not be available for another few years or so. Visual Basic was still pretty primitive back then as well. Lotus Script together with Lotus Dialog Editor could be used to develop serious full scale databases, small scale data wharehouses, and applications.

Lotus Script was a powerful language, and I used it and Lotus Dialog Editor, during 1993 to develop dozens of dialogs and write 10,000 or so lines of Lotus Script code for a serious multi-hyper cube data wharehouse system developed for an electricity company.

Inside a single Improv project, you could have many multi-dimensional hyper cubes of data and link them all together with simple formulas, so that numbers in one changed, then numbers in others changed and recalculated to reflect the changes.

You could easily create summary / total worksheets from detailed worksheets.

You could easily graph and chart the data in a wide variety of ways.

Included with Improv was excellent on-line help with lots of examples, a lot of example worksheets, an entertaining and imaginitive on-line tour (tutorial) of Improv that gave you everything you need to get started and more, and a great set of manuals that explained the basics very clearly. (The only complaint I had was that more help was needed on Lotus Script).

You could add sexy GUI front ends to your models, and allow users to interact with buttons and dialogs and edit boxes. Indeed you could develop entire applications, and you could distribute these applications with other users as long as they had Improv installed on their machines as well.

If Lotus had developed a Project Compiler to generate stand-alone EXE files from Improv Projects, then the applications you developed could have been distributed to other users and they would not even need to own a copy of Improv. This would have been awesome.

Improv was a beautiful and sophisticated. It was a real quality product.

Improv was a Killer Application.

So, What Happened Next ?

Lotus had the most amazing, intuitive, user-friendly, and powerful spreadsheet style program ever developed.

Improv wasn't perfect, but it was an awesome product, and with the right support by Lotus, it could be even better.

In fact, I loved the product so much, that I purchased two copies of it for myself in the first few days it came out.

Almost everyone I knew who saw the product instantly fell in love with it.

All of Lotus Corporation's financial problems would surely soon be over, as they were about to sweep aside all of the competition : Quatro Pro, Excel, and all other spreadsheets would become redundant and crushed over night by Improv's brilliance.

So, what did Lotus do ?

Did they extend the product ? No.
Did they improve the product ? No.
Did they attack the spreadsheet market and hold Improv up as a shining beacon ? No.

Lotus Corporation did none of these things.

Oh, yes, there was a minor update - called Lotus Improv v2.1 - that added a few things, but this was not a major update. (v2.1 added Lotus 1-2-3 WK4 Import/Export support, Working Together Icons, and the ability to exchange data with Lotus Notes).

N.B. In the months after I published this review, quite a few people have emailed me about this Lotus Improv v2.1 upgrade, and it appears that quite a few sites on the internet still carry this update. If you go to your favourite search engine, such as Google and type in :

"Improv 2.0" +2.1

or, better, yet, click here to have the search already set up for you, then you should soon find and be able to download the Lotus Improv v2.1 upgrade.

Apparently, at the time, Lotus 1-2-3 users were confused by Improv and didn't know which direction to take : Improv or 1-2-3. So, Lotus Corporation acted to protect its core business (Lotus 1-2-3), and cancelled all development and support for Improv.

Apparently, Lotus didn't make this cancellation of Improv official until April 1996. But, the writing was well and truly on the wall by the end of 1994. And, during 1994, I remember being so dismayed and upset by the impending death of Improv.

A product with the brightest future was cancelled, and would soon be forgotten by everyone - except those who had ever glimpsed its beauty and spledour.

Even though Improv was developed for Windows 3.1, it (like 99.9999% of Windows 3.x software) still runs perfectly under Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, and XP.

A Little PC History :

Even in 1987, Lotus was steering clear of Windows.

This is partly because Lotus Corporation's CEO, Jim Manzi, was extremely jealous of the success of Microsoft's CEO, Bill Gates, and refused to do anything that would help Bill Gates, such as endorsing Windows by developing Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows.

Another reason for Lotus Corporation's reluctance to move into the Windows market was even simpler than this.

At the time (mid to late 1980's), PC users all enjoyed using DOS :

• with the sophisticated menuing DOS programs available back then,

• the amazing raw speed of DOS applications that didn't always have to be run in WYSIWYG mode (What You See is What You Get) or on top of a GUI,

• the 10's of thousands of terrific DOS applications and utilities available, and,

• the ability to run multiple TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) programs in the background, such as disk formatters, Side Kick, popup calculators, Postcode Lookup programs, screen grabbers, etc. These programs could be poped up at any time by pressing a hot-key combination, such as ALT-S to call up Sidekick. (Yes, you could do primitive "multi-tasking" in DOS !)

all meant that there was no real reason to run a Graphical User Interface (GUI).

Sure, GUIs looked great, but they soaked up too much precious computer power.

The joke at the time was that running a GUI was "like running a car with a few of the spark plug leads pulled off !" And it was true !

If PC users wanted to use a Graphical User Interface (GUI), then we could always use GEM, VisiOn, or even Windows 1.x, and Windows 2.x that were all available at the time and most had been available for several years.

But, PC user's hated graphical user interfaces back then simply because they soaked up so much machine resources and made everything much slower than it was under DOS.

We PC users preferred speed over looks.

But, just because programs were written for DOS, then it didn't mean that they couldn't be attractive, user-friendly, intuitive, and easy to use. It did mean, however, that programmers had to work a little harder to make their programs attractive, user-friendly, intuitive, and easy to use.

We PC users preferred to be able to edit 500 or 1,000 page documents in a word processor, than being limited to 18 pages of text under a GUI. (Don't laugh ! This 18 pages of text limit was faced by the first Apple MAC users).

We PC users preferred raw unbridled speed. We wanted, for example, to press page down 15 times in one of our documents and see the results intantaneously, and not have to wait 25 seconds. (Again, don't laugh ! This was how slow early Apple MACs were).

Anyone who tried to run a GUI on a personal computer (particularly an entry-level personal computer) before the late 1980's was either mentally deficient, or else didn't use their computer for serious work, or else they only ran one application at a time, or else they were very patient and very forgiving. Maybe these people could afford to have things look nice on screen (WYSIWYG), because they were only producing short documents and did not do any serious work on their machines.

Or else they had some hellishly expensive box (e.g. a workstation) with the power to handle the job.

Most computers that attempted to run GUIs back in the mid-late 1980's were jokes, as were the people that used them. This situation held true until late 1989.

But, in the very late 1980's and in early 1990, all that changed for ever :

• Microsoft had released Windows 3.0, which was an excellent product and a joy to use - a real killer application,

• CPU power was going through the roof, and the new Intel 80386 CPU was standard on all new PCs,

• PCs were now coming with a massive 2 MB of memory as standard,

• For the first time ever, PCs were coming bundled with Windows as standard,

• and we finally had powerful and easily affordable machines that could run powerful GUIs and multi-task a dozen applications on top of those GUIs at acceptable speeds.

So, suddenly, in 1990 and 1991, everyone flocked to Windows.

The time was finally ripe for GUIs to take control, and Windows 3 was an excellent product that was a real joy to use. It was a true Killer Application. It was powerful, it was fast, and it could multi-task a dozen applications with ease. It it was irresistable to everyone who saw it and used it.

(Well, everyone that is with the possible exception of some jealous / rabid users of other computers / operating systems ... ;) Sadly, some blindly swallowed lies and jumped on their little bandwagons and beat their chests and derided and jeered at Windows 3 without ever seeing it or using it. Microsoft's competitors obviously felt incredibly frightened and threatened by Windows 3, and they attempted to stir up the "Anti-Windows" hysteria, which just shows how great Windows 3 really was !!)

Windows 3 was certainly good enough for me, and in 1990, I started to leave my beloved DOS world - with my hundreds of programs and utilities - behind forever and moved to Windows 3.0. That year, I started to say goodbye to some good old friends : Xtree Pro Gold was an awesome program which had served me faithfully and saved me many hundreds of hours of time during the 1980's. (I still own two copies of XTree). WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS was a great program, and I knew it inside and out. (I still own WordPerfect 4.2). Lotus 1-2-3 and DBase III. Turbo Pascal v3.3. Mace Utilities. PKARC. Ventura Publisher. Neopaint. All great programs, but that fat lady had sung, and it was time to move on.

And, another great bonus of Windows 3.0 was that you could still run all of your old DOS programs from within Windows, or else you could boot into DOS and run your programs / games from there.

That was the great part - from 1990 onwards, PC users in effect had 2 great operating systems (DOS and Windows) and we could choose and run the best programs from each. It was all about choice and empowering the user. It enabled us to choose the best tools, and the best operating system, for every job.

Needles to say, Windows 3 was a huge success, and the power and flexibility of the DOS / Windows 3.0 combination was irresistable, and it took off like wild fire.

Now was the time for all companies to release Windows versions of all of their products.

But, Lotus Corporation did not bring out Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows for ages, and by the time they did, it was miles behind Microsoft's flagship spreadsheet product, Excel, and would never catch up.

Pretty soon, Lotus 1-2-3, which had been on almost every PC user's desktop for years would be replaced by the beautiful and much more user frieldly Microsoft Excel.

The same thing happened with WordPerfect Corporation's flagship product, WordPerfect. A great word processor for DOS that was on almost everyones PC. But, it wasn't until early 1992 that WordPerfect Corporation brought out a Windows version of WordPerfect, but by then Microsoft Word was miles ahead and had an unassailable lead. WordPerfect Corporation were never able to catch up.

Conclusions and Summary :

If Lotus Corporation had improved the product, added internet support, extended the database support, then it is possible that there would be no such thing as Java today - everything would be written in Lotus Script.

Improv was a product that was ahead of its time in so many ways.

But in so many ways, it was a product that demonstrated exactly how spreadsheets, data, and formulae should be handled. It put all other spreadsheets to shame, and showed everyone how things should have been done all along.

Almost everyone who saw Improv said "Ofcourse ... this is how things should work ! It *should* be this easy !".

It is a real shame that Lotus Corporation cancelled Improv. However, in the light of Lotus Corporation's other decisions during the 1980's and 1990's, it is hardly suprising ...

Today, in 2002, few people today even remember Word Perfect or Lotus 1-2-3 or Lotus Improv.

Last Minute News : 5-Feb-2002

However, I was suprised to find a few people who remembered and loved Improv like me, and who had the same feelings about the product as I did.

All of the Improv related sites found were old (generally from 1991-1994), but this showed people cared about Improv.

I think Simson L. Garfinkel summed it up best : (simsong@vineyard.net, in his message dated Thu, 25 Feb 1999 10:55:32 -0800, at http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/feb99/0164.html

[ ... snip ...]

Unfortunately, that's the end of the story. I'm legally prohibited from making copies of Improv for my friends and co-workers. Improv is protect by copyright, and even though Lotus no longer sells or supports the product, that protection still holds. In a very real way, this is a kind of crime against society. The purpose of copyright under our legal tradition is to give authors protection for their intellectual works, so that they will be motivated to produce new ones. It is a bargain between society and the inventor. If a company like Lotus reneges on its side of the bargain --- and in the case of Improv, Lotus surely has --- I think that the works that were protected by copyright should become public property. That is, I think that they should go into the public domain.

One of the prime offenders in this world of dead software is Apple, which has mothballed the Newton and all but given up on the Nextstep operating systems. Ultimately, it would probably be in the best interest of both Apple's shareholders and society as a whole for companies like Lotus and Improv [That's a typo - it should read Lotus and Apple - Moose] to release their failed products to the public.

There is a simple reason they do not: If the public did a better job with the software, it would prove that these products died because of mismanagement, not because of the competitive environment.

More News : 6-Feb-2002

From: Mike O'Malley
Sent: Wednesday, 6 February 2002 15:52
Subject: Lotus Improv

Way back in 1993 / 1994, I used Lotus Improv to develop a bunch of small applications and models.

Improv was a beautiful product - formulas in plain English, one formula can apply to one cell or a whole group of cells, formulas (i.e. operations) separate from your data, and you can view your data any way you want with the click of a mouse button.

Out of the 1,000's of programs, products, and applications I have ever used, I would have to say that Lotus Improv was definitely one of the most impressive, and that it had enormous potential and the brightest possible future.

But, in 1996, Lotus formally cancelled development and support for Improv, although the writing was on the wall long before this.

I hope you understand : this was very upsetting to the loyal Improv fans around the world.

Do you know if Lotus / IBM will ever bring back Lotus Improv ?

If not, would you be interested in releasing the product to the Public Domain ?

I look forward to your reply.

Mike O'Malley

Maybe this will get IBM to release the product to the public domain or resurrect the product again ... I'll keep you posted if I receive any replies. (Don't hold your breath though ... ;)

More News : 21-June-2004

Lotus Improv :

Ease of Use :	9.9 / 10
Power :	9 / 10
Features :	9 / 10
Development Tools :	9 / 10
Compatibility with Future Operating Systems: Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, etc (Improv was developed for Windows 3.x)	10 / 10
Moose's Overall Rating :	9.5 / 10

From Here you can :

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