17 posts
The Invention of the Pivot Table | Pivot Table Data Crunching for Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Pivot Table Data Crunching for Microsoft Office Excel 2007,2003, (isbn 0789736012, ean 0789736012), by Jelen B., Alexander M. October 19, 2021 at 12:31AM
The history of spreadsheets In this article, we briefly cover the history of spreadsheets starting with their origin, evolution, and the current scenario. October 18, 2021 at 04:55PM
An Introduction to Pivot Tables Using Excel 2000 An Introduction to Pivot Tables Using Excel 2000. What are Pivot Tables?. The Pivot Tables facility is a feature of Excel which is used for summarising data in a spreadsheet or database – e.g. by adding, averaging or counting without having to create formulae. October 18, 2021 at 04:54PM
A long long time ago there was a product called Lotus Improv. Our premise was that complex spreadsheets were very difficult to maintain, to audit and to modify. So much so that we had heard stories about companies fearing making any change to the spreadsheets they run their business on.
Maybe the person who created the monster was no longer with the company or maybe the spreadsheet was so complicated (and untestable) that the benefits of making a change did not outweigh the risk of introducing an error. That was around 1987.
Here we are 25 years later and shockingly the situation seems to still be tolerated. From an article in MarketWatch:
“Suc...
This isn’t a huge new insight but it’s interesting to see history kind of repeating itself.
Sometimes a product is so locked in and so entrenched that it looks like it will never be beat. After all, no one ever got fired for buying IBM right? And you’d have to be crazy to try to build a new spreadsheet to compete with Excel, because companies large and small have an unbelievable investment in training, familiarity and documents so that any change is extremely hard and costly.
It is said, correctly, I think, that such entrenched software products often get unseated during a platform switch. When a dominant technology platform (e.g. PCs or Windows) is losing it’s dominance in...
In recent weeks there have been two exciting announcements of acquisitions of companies started by friends of mine, and not coincidentally, ex-Lotus Development Corporation folks. Congratulations to Mussie Shore, who started Zingku on his announcement that he’s entered into an agreement to have Google acquire their Zingku service.
And congratulations to: Rick Treitman, Mike Kraley, Paul Kleppner, and many others on their announcement that Adobe Systens has signed a definitive agreemenet to acquire Virtual Ubiquity, makers of Buzzword.
Way to go!!!
Check out this post from Joel on Software: ** IBM just released an open-source office suite called IBM Lotus Symphony. Sounds like Yet Another StarOffice distribution. But I suspect they’re probably trying to wipe out the memory of the original Lotus Symphony, which had been hyped as the Second Coming and which fell totally flat. It was the software equivalent of Gigli. (from: Strategy Letter VI)
Actually this is a great article about strategy in the [tag]software business.[/tag] But us Lotus alums remember Symphony and had quite a chuckle to see that IBM brought back the [tag]Lotus Symphony[/tag] brand.I am waiting for the second coming of other great product names owned by Lotus: Lotus Manuscript; Lotus Jazz; Where are they now?
PC Magazine’s newest issue has a retrospective of their past 25 years and LotusImprov gets mentioned for one of the big deals of 1993. And yes, you can see a bad picture of yours truly back in those days. “Innovators: Pito Salas
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A million years ago I used Lotus Notes … I think it was version 3 and 4. I believe that it ran on Mac even then so I am not sure what the big news is. But look at this screen shot. It looks more similar than different to the old Lotus Notes. And among the Mac congesenti there’s always a lot of tut-tut-tuting when an application claims to support Mac OS X but doesn’t have the true Mac OS X mojo. I guess they give IBM a pass.
Check out this post from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW):
Filed under: Software, Internet Tools...
I don’t know why I thought this was so cool. Maybe it’s my long standing background with Spreadsheets, from when I worked at Lotus. You remember Improv, don’t you? Or maybe you don’t…
Anyway, “Google Plans to Release Spreadsheet Application” !
“Google Inc. plans Tuesday to release a Web-based spreadsheet application, in a further foray into Microsoft Corp.’s traditional turf…
… Google Spreadsheets follows Google’s March purchase of a company offering Web- based word processor Writely. The two free Web-based Google ...
Hey, I just came across this:
“The Invention of the Pivot Table: The concept that led to today’s pivot table came from the halls of the Lotus Development Corporation with a revolutionary spreadsheet program called Lotus Improv. Improv was envisioned in 1986 by Pito Salas of the Advanced Technology Group at Lotus.
Realizing that spreadsheets often have patterns of data, Pito concluded that if one could build a tool that could recognize these patterns, then one could build enhanced data models. Lotus ran with the concept and started developing the next-generation spreadsheet.” (from ...
Being a veteran of the groupware movement (worked at Lotus for years, and co-founded eRoom Technology) this item caught my eye:
“Liquid Systems, a venture-funded software company that is focused on enterprise messaging and collaboration, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans.” (from InfoWorld)
I guess only the InfoWorld headline refers to “groupware” but it’s a very 80’s term, that even in the 90’s we at eRoom avoided like the plague.
Technorati Tags: collaboration, groupware, vc
I came across this bit:
“Are we going to be a player in VoIP? Absolutely. Are we going to be prepared to disrupt our own business? Absolutely, Why? Because if not, somebody else will.” (Techdirt)
It reminds me of stuff I used to say way back when, when I was making the case for building Improv (which was code named “BackBay”, and as an R&D project “Modeler”.)
In those days, of course, Lotus (remember?) was the undisputed PC software leader, with 1-2-3 (remember?) being the wunderkind-unbelievable-cash cow for Lotus. I used to say things like “With Improv we threw out the rule ...
I got many comments from people about my postingsrecently about Lotus Improv. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a pretty accurate description of Improv and its history in the WikiPedia. By the way, I had absolutely nothing to do with writing it. Actually I am quite curious who did write it, because he or she was pretty well informed so I suspect it’s someone who was on the team from the early days, or knew someone who was. (Of course there are a few inaccuracies, but what the heck!) Cool
Seems like a dredged up some “old” (you know who you are) Improv fans with my earlier posting, so I thought an additional comment or two might be in order. First off, lest it be misunderstood, in no way do I feel anything but totally proud about Imrpov as a concept and a product. I hope it is not inconsistent to feel that way, and yet agree that for a variety of reason it was not successful, as a product.
The concept of an alternative (not replacement) for a spreadsheet for real financial modeling is, I think, quite sound. (Yes, I can do page layout in Microsoft Word, but if that’s my purpose, PageMaker is better. You could make an analogous poin...
It’s been a while. Which is why my heart beat just a little faster when I read a reference to Improv (not altogether flattering) in the Adam Bossworth pieceI just wrote about, where he said:
*** Consider the spreadsheet**. It is a protean, sloppy, plastic, flexible medium that is, ironically, the despair of all accountants and auditors because it is virtually impossible to reliably understand a truly complex and rich spreadsheet.
Lotus corporation (now IBM), filled with Harvard MBA’s and PhD’s in CS from MIT, built Improv. Improv set out “to fix all this”. It was an auditors dream. It provided rarified heights of abstraction, for...
