After I finished at university
back in the early 90's, I worked for a few years at American
Express in Brighton. If you've been a student in Brighton the
chances are you've worked at Amex at some point (their
European processing centre is in the centre of the city) and
I worked in the part of the organisation that settled up with
retailers. Part of my work involved building databases and
financial models, and one of the applications I used was
something called Lotus Improv.
Lotus Improv was a new spreadsheet
application by the makers of
Lotus 1-2-3,
and was billed as being a revolutionary rethink of how
spreadsheets should work. Improv did away with column and row
headings, separated out data from formulas and from views of the
data, and had an approach where you keyed in the data that made
up your model, Improv guessed at what you were trying to do and
between you and the application, the financial model just sort
of appeared.
The really cool thing about
Improv though was that it let you put together multi-dimensional
worksheets that aren't a million miles away from the OLAP
applications we work with today. Using Improv, you could put
together a regular rows and columns spreadsheet in a similar
fashion to 1-2-3 or Excel, but then you could go on and name
these as for example "Products" and "Time" and then add
additional "dimensions" such as Salesperson, Item, Channel and
so forth.
In fact, what you
were building up was very similar to the crosstab interfaces
with dimension selectors you get with OracleBI Discoverer and
the OracleBI Spreadsheet Add-in, with the added benefit that you
actually entered the data directly into the spreadsheet rather
than having to load it through the OLAP server first. There's an
excellent write-up of Improv over at Moose's Software Valley
where you can see the complete process of building an Improv
spreadsheet and doing some multidimensional analysis.
As well as giving
you a spreadsheet interface to an OLAP cube, Improv also came
with a scripting language called Lotus Script that performs much
the same function as Express 4GL and Express Basic.
Not a bad little
package actually. Although Improv
originated
on the NeXT platform, the version I used was ported to
Windows 3.1 back in 1993 and it sold for around £100, for which
you got a desktop OLAP server, a pretty capable spreadsheet and
what was considered to be a powerful scripting language. So,
where did it all go wrong?
From speaking to a
few guys in the office who used to work for the OLAP vendors of
the time, the likes of Comshare, Holos and IRI were worried
about Improv at the time as it had much the same functionality
as product such as
Holos and Express but with the backing of Lotus, who at the
time were number one in the spreadsheet market with 1-2-3. In
the end though, Lotus marketed Improv more as "spreadsheets done
right" (referring to the separation of data and formulas, and
the more rigid structure of an Improv model) rather than it's
OLAP capabilities, which unfortunately had the effect of
confusing those customers who now had to choose between 1-2-3
and Improv, and instead chose Microsoft Excel instead. From an
architecture viewpoint, Improv was also limited by the fact that
its cubes ran in memory rather than being paged to disk, so it
was always limited in what it could hold, especially with the
typical amount of memory a PC had then, and so in the end was
never really the threat to vendors such as IRI and Holistic
Systems that it could have been. Still, it's an interesting
historical footnote and the technology, or at least the
approach, still lives on today in the Pivot Tables you get with
Microsoft Excel, and a product called
Quantrix
that
aims to recreate much of the same functionality that Lotus
Improv had.
If you're
interested in reading a bit more about Lotus Improv, here's a
few good resources: