[hbbio]

"The world needs a better spreadsheet"

I read this when I was a teen (as that's long ago). It was at a time Lotus was going to launch Improv in 1993! Improv was the attempt made by a very smart team at Lotus to reconquer the crowd that went to Excel.

But as you can guess, the great product never found its market (or never grew beyond a niche) and was killed a few years later.

cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv

[n00b101]

It's worth noting that Quantrix Modeler [1] (founded in 2002) did carry on the torch after Lotus Improv, and continues to exist. That said, it's not clear how much traction Quantrix got either. It was bought out in 2010 by IDBS and te deal value wasn't disclosed, but it was reported that they had only nine employees at the time of acquisition. Another very interesting earlier attempt in this market was Javelin [2].

[1] https://www.quantrix.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_Software