@Edward de Jong / Beads Project Have you read any analysis of how that happened? I know a former Lotus exec I could ask for their side of the story.

I am familiar with most of the story. Visicalc was the origin. But then people immediately asked for graphing, and they created Visiplot. The Lotus 1-2-3 product combined graphing and spreadsheets into one product. They also did a better job of tracking new platforms. Borland's Quattro was a stiff competitor for a while. but all of the standalone products were eventually killed by office suites, which included word processing, spreadsheets, and other basic essential programs. There was a long battle with lots of dead bodies, and very innovative products that deserve further study like Framework, which was a very flexible and powerful tool for its time. Many of the products were better than the companies that controlled them. More often than not, it was poor business decisions and crazy management that scuttled these firms. It was the wild west at that point, and very eccentric personalities were more common then. Today we are in much more serious and deliberate business era. By the way the sequel to Visicalc was TK/Solver, a really clever product that allowed you to go backwards from a desired result to the inputs. I worked on a similar product called Profile for a consulting firm spun out of McKinsey, that allowed fortune 50 companies to set targets, and then it would tell each division what they had to do to meet the goals. Going backwards in computers in any dimension is very tricky, because computers at their core only have "forward", "pause", "reset", but no reverse gear. Speed control can be faked by pausing repeatedly. Excel added a few backsolving features and that killed off TK/Solver. but it was built by Bricklin and Frankston who were an unbeatable inventive team.

Have you tried Lotus Improv? I think it may have only been available on NeXTstep. Google sheets feels very primitive in comparison to (my memories of) Improv.

Lotus Improv is one of the greatest failures in the history of computers. And what i mean by that is it was a business failure, but a great product. It was amazing, and really a sign of management incompetence that they could not move that product out of its toy platform into the mainstream. So what if it would have cost a lot to port it, when Windows has 92% and mac 8% and nextstep 0.0001% why do you not move it? I used to make educational software. KidPix was a million CDROM based painting program for kindergartners. I saw the success, and built a product codenamed Teenpix, designed to teach painting to teenagers. It was a product positioned between KidPix and Deluxe Paint 2 which was the #1 pixel painting program on Amiga and Windows from EA. Anyway the manager at Broderbund who turned it down, Harry Wilkers, said that there is no market in computer software for teenage products. (!?) Wow what foresight did he have? Gee i think teenagers buy 20 billion a year in software nowadays... so all of these bad decisions are made by managers who aren't that bright. Happens every day in the tech industry. So rare to have managers that know good from bad. This is why Scott Adams has such a long and successful cartooning career, because that pointed haired boss is alive and well!

Yeah, it’s remarkable that not only did Lotus not get the significance of Improv, but every competitor after has also missed it. For example, if the folks at Google sheets looked at Improv, how could they not use it as the standard to work towards? Maybe they were just told to clone Excel in a browser?

Joel dismisses Lotus Improv as an overly complex tool. And he uses its lack of market success as a measure of its intrinsic quality. Well, when you are just shipping your product and your CEO Steve Jobs gets re-hired at Apple, and the NextStep machine is scuttled, which happens to be the only machine your software will run on, that creates an interesting marketing problem. Do you wait years for Jobs to blend in his NextStep technology, creating OSX which was utter crap for several versions? The true merits or weaknesses of the Improv product never got to be experienced by any appreciable number of users. There is a very expensive spreadsheet type of product that allows you to share generic formulas, which was one of the features of Improv, so some of the key concepts do exist out there. But never judge quality by volume of sales. Faberge didn't make very many eggs, but they are still admired greatly. And i disagree that Excel is some paragon of virtue. It is a very powerful product, but i find it very clumsy the way they have poured in so much function and hidden lots of things. Although the MS Wizard approach does work for dumb users (of which there are many), in the creative software area, MS has never had a successful product that I can think of. They have tried over and over to win desktop publishing, or painting software, and they fail because Wizards presuppose a known goal, and creative work is often exploratory. Having made very successful kids software like Flying Colors, all you need to do with a kid is show them the basics and they run with it into directions you don't expect. Minecraft is an example of a very successful creative product, arguably the most successful creative toy ever made. I am sure the author of Minecraft never imagined how far people would take that product.

“But never judge quality by volume of sales” Yup. As Benjamin Graham said: “In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine” When people assume the short term has done the weighing, they take every attribute of a successful company or product, and claim it’s success was a direct consequence of that attribute. In the 1990s, it was commonly said that design doesn’t matter because Microsoft (with bad design) beat Apple (with good design). Then the iPhone appeared and the industry did 180 degree turn on that opinion. This is one anecdote, but practically every industry opinion has taken turns like this. Having lived through so many of these, I’ve come to the opinion that companies/products are successful not because of every attribute, but despite most of them.

Thanks. Very thoughtful comments gave me a lot to think about

In automative history there are numerous breakthrough/stellar products that bombed, like the Pierce Arrow or the Chrysler Airflow. There are so many great products that somehow don't get their day in the sun. Or how about the history of Mr. Collins, who was a radio genius during WW2 and made tube-based radios that were capable of passing the Navy droptest, which is where you take the product and drop it 3 ft onto concrete. and have it still work? He took all of his WW2 money and invested in a message switching system around 1959... the air force couldn't understand it at the time, but it predates the internet by quite a bit. People couldn't understand it at the time what it meant. Somebody needs to write a book about the greatest ideas in history that didn't get their chance to have their design in the marketplace where it could have been a contender. Consider the unfortunate fate of the Chrysler Turbine car, which worked fine, and could have revolutionized cars but got caught up in the financial mess at the parent company. Re the Chrysler Turbine car, which has an excellent book about its history, one of the key engineers Williams continued working on turbine engines, and created the motor for that most lethal weapon, the cruise missile, which gets about 8000 miles on a tank of gas. That is a case where a component of a doomed project resurfaces, and finds its niche where it is uniquely optimal.