I think a major fault in the article is the minimization of the impact Improv had on the Pivot Table concept. Much like Numbers twists the spreadsheet paradigm

I think a major fault in the article is the minimization of the impact Improv had on the Pivot Table concept. Much like Numbers twists the spreadsheet paradigm into independent tables on a page instead of tabs, Improv twisted the spreadsheet into everything is a Pivot Table (or Excel Table). And it was first written for NeXt workstations before being ported to Windows. It was a radical departure from Lotus’s previous products and they never realized what they had in it. Microsoft capitalized on that lack of imagination by incorporating much of the functionality into the existing spreadsheet model.