Lotus Improv

~ the last words ~

in 1991 i was seven years old in ankara. lotus improv was a spreadsheet for the nextstep workstation, a five-thousand-dollar machine that no household in turkey had reason to own. honestly, i would not type a formula into a spreadsheet until at least 1998, and by then it was excel 97 in a school computer lab.

improv was the kind of product that gets remembered for being right early. lotus had hired a small team out of cambridge to rethink the spreadsheet from scratch on nextstep, the new workstation steve jobs had built after leaving apple in 1985. for whatever reason, the team chose to break the one assumption every spreadsheet had carried since visicalc in 1979. they separated the data from the formulas from the views. you could have one underlying table and pivot it twelve ways without rewriting anything.

the press cycle was glowing. steve jobs reportedly sent the team an enormous bouquet of flowers when they switched from os/2 to nextstep in 1989. by then, when improv 1.0 shipped in february 1991, jobs sent truckloads of flowers. macworld called it the most innovative software on the nextstep platform. the nextstep magazines ran cover stories. lotus had built a product that was clearly years ahead.

none of that fixed the platform problem. nextstep had maybe fifty thousand users worldwide in 1991. improv on nextstep was a beautiful product for almost nobody. lotus ported it to windows 3.1 in may 1993, but by then excel 4.0 had been on windows for two years and the corporate buyers were already standardized. anyway, the windows version of improv stalled. lotus halted active development in august 1994, and when ibm bought lotus in june 1995 for $3.5 billion the new owner had no reason to keep improv on the product list. it was discontinued in april 1996.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

the design was the part people kept talking about. in improv you defined named ranges instead of cell addresses. a formula did not say "=a1*b2", it said "=price*quantity". the data lived in one place, the formulas referenced it by meaning, and the views were separate tile-based layouts you could drag around without breaking anything underneath. honestly, this is roughly what pivot tables became in excel five years later, except improv's version was the whole sheet, not a single feature buried under a menu.

the nextstep version was beautiful in a way that mattered. nextstep had display postscript on the screen, which meant fonts rendered at print quality, and improv's tile layouts looked like a magazine page. for whatever reason, the windows port lost a lot of this because windows 3.1 had no comparable rendering layer, the tiles looked flatter, the typography was vga-era. people who had used improv on nextstep were vocal about how much the port had lost.

~ the long tail ~

improv did not have a real successor at lotus. by then the company was being absorbed into ibm and the product roadmap was being cut to focus on notes and 1-2-3. the engineers who had built improv left. one of them, david sokol, took the design ideas to a company called lighthouse design that ibm later bought as well. some of the same ideas ended up in a product called quantrix, which is still sold in 2026 as a financial-modeling tool for analysts who want a multi-dimensional spreadsheet that excel cannot do.

apple numbers, when it shipped in 2007, used some of the tile-layout ideas improv had pioneered. nobody at apple cited improv directly but the influence is visible if you look at the two products side by side. by then most spreadsheet users had never heard of improv. it sat in the part of computing history where the right answer arrives on the wrong platform at the wrong moment and gets forgotten until the bigger players quietly copy what was working.

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