[getravi]

Never knew Improv existed. There are tools that are similar to the vision of Improv. I use Anaplan at work everyday and it is exactly what a modern cloud based SaaS version of Improv would feel like. It is a multi billion dollar company and it worked because it did not go after the spreadsheet space but played along nicely with it.

The Improv article concludes "the key strategy mistake was to try to market Improv to the existing spreadsheet market. Instead, if the product were marketed to a segment where the more structured model was a ‘feature’ not a ‘bug’ would have given Lotus the time to learn and improve and refine the model to a point where it would have satisfied the larger market as well." and Anaplan seems to not have made this mistake. They have carved out a niche in the EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) market.

[quantified]

Improv's model was poor though, it was based on cell positions and it was easy to double-count. Basically was bad at various semantic aspects. I worked on a small conpetitor back in the day and we competed on modelling, there were a number of others too.

I've also worked on Anaplan and and its modeling is also much better, so please don't lower it to any version of Improv! It isn't, or at least wasn't a little while back, good at cross-metric ("line item" to them") calculations and presentations, but still easier to get something complex correct.

The real mistake of Improv was that it wasn't 1-2-3 so Lotus didn't know how to narket it or sell it.