Ashton-Tate
Encyclopedia
Ashton-Tate was a US
based software company best known for developing the popular dBASE
database application
. Ashton-Tate grew from a small garage-based company to become a multinational corporation. Once one of the "Big Three" software companies, which included Microsoft
and Lotus
, the company stumbled and was later sold to Borland
in September 1991.
had written Vulcan to help run an office football pool at his day job at JPL. Vulcan was a database application
that ran on the CP/M
operating system
, and was modeled on JPL/DIS, a Univac
1106 program used at JPL and written by fellow programmer Jeb Long.
Tate and Lashlee had already built two successful start-up companies by this time - Discount Software (whose president was Ron Dennis), which was one of the first to sell PC software programs through the mail to consumers, and Software Distributors (acting CEO at the time was Linda Johnson), (later re-named SofTeam)- which was one of the first wholesale distributors of PC software in the world.
The founders changed the name of Vulcan to "dBASE II" on the recommendation of Hal Pawluk, an advertising expert who single-handedly drove and ran the early advertising programs for dBASE. His idea was that naming the first release of the product "II" would imply that it was already in its second version, and therefore would be perceived as being more reliable than a first release. The original manual was too complex from Pawluk's perspective, so he wrote a second manual, which was duly included in the package along with the first. Pawluck created the name for the new publishing company by combining George's last name with the fictional name Ashton (purportedly because it was felt that "Ashton-Tate" sounded better, or was easier to pronounce, than "Lashlee-Tate"). Later, David Cole bought a parrot and named it Ashton, because people kept calling the company asking to speak to Mr Ashton.
In 1981 the founders hired David Cole to be the chairman, president and CEO of their group of companies. The group was called "Software Plus." It did not trade under its own name, but was a holding company for the three startups: Discount Software, Software Distributors, and Ashton-Tate. Cole was given free rein to run the businesses, while George Tate primarily remained involved in Ashton-Tate. Lashlee was somewhat less involved on a day-to-day basis in Ashton-Tate by this time, although he was always aware of and up to speed on all three of the businesses, and was an active board member and officer of SPI.
In June of 1982 Cole hired Rod Turner as the director of OEM sales for Ashton-Tate. In a few weeks Turner solved a sales commission plan issue, that had been bothering George Tate for some time, with the top performing salesperson (Barbara Weingarten, now Guerra), and Tate and Cole promoted Turner to be Vice President of world-wide sales three weeks after his initial hire. Turner was approximately the 12th employee of Ashton Tate. Since the company was truly boot-strapped (ie no external venture capital), the founders did not make a practice of hiring experienced veterans, and most of the team at Ashton-Tate were young and enthusiastic but inexperienced. Jim Taylor was responsible for product management in the early days, and worked closely with Wayne Ratliff and the other key developers on dBASE II. In 1982 Perry Lawrence and Nelson Tso were the two developers who were employed at Ashton-Tate, while Wayne Ratliff employed Jeb Long from his royalty stream.
In the period prior to volume shipments of the IBM PC (which was announced on August 11, 1981, with volume shipments occurring by fall 1982), the most popular microcomputer operating system was CP/M. dBASE II was launched on CP/M and achieved good success on it, priced at $700 per copy (per PC). The CP/M market was fragmented, with many hardware companies and nascent channels. dBASE II was ported to the IBM PC (ie the MS-DOS operating system) and shipped in September of 1982. Pawluk ran advertisements promoting dBASE II for the IBM PC for months before it shipped. When dBASE II for the IBM PC shipped, it was one of few major applications available on the PC, and that fact, combined with good promotion and sales in the US and internationally, caused dBASE II sales to grow rapidly. Turner expanded Aston-Tate's international distribution efforts and encouraged exclusive distributors in major markets to translate dBASE II from English to non-English versions. The early presence of dBASE II in international markets, as IBM rolled out the PC in those markets, facilitated rapid growth in sales and market share for dBASE. At one point in 1983, the company's French distributor "La Command Electronique" (whose owner was Hughes LeBlanc) claimed that "one in ten buyers of a PC in France is buying dBASE II."
In the winter of 1982, Turner recruited the managing director (David Imberg) for Ashton-Tate's first subsidiary, Ashton-Tate UK. Turner set a goal for Imberg of achieving 15% per month compound revenue growth in the first 18 months (using the prior UK distributor's volume as a starting point), which Imberg accomplished. When Turner brought Imberg to the Culver City, California corporate headquarters of Ashton-Tate to be trained, the offices were so crowded that the only space available for Imberg was a small desk beside a large photocopier, with no phone line; the offices were so crowded that when Turner needed to conduct a confidential meeting, he would have it standing up in the nearby restroom.
With the growing popularity of ever-larger hard drives on personal computers, dBASE II turned out to be a huge seller. For its time, dBASE was extremely advanced. It was one of the first database products that ran on a microcomputer
, and its programming environment (the dBASE language) allowed it to be used to build a wide variety of custom applications. Although microcomputers had limited memory and storage at the time, dBASE nevertheless allowed a huge number of small-to-medium sized tasks to be automated. The value-added resellers (VARs) who developed applications using dBASE became an important early sales channel for dBASE.
By the end of the fiscal year ending in January 1982, the firm had revenues of almost $3.7 million with an operating loss of $313 thousand.
Among Cole's early acts was to hire an accountant to set up a financial system, install a management structure, and introduce processes to manage operations and orders. Cole's mission was "to shift the balance of power from those who understand how computers work to those who need what computers can do."
Cole licensed two products in 1982, building on his publishing background. These two unsuccessful products were launched in October 1982: The Financial Planner and The Bottom Line Strategist. The Financial Planner was a sophisticated financial modeling system that used its own internal language - but it was not as widely appealing as spreadsheets like SuperCalc. The Bottom Line Strategist was a template financial analysis system that had very limited flexibility and function. Both were released at the same price as dBASE II, but neither product was aggressively marketed, and both were put into a benign-neglect mode by Turner when it became clear that they did not have sizable potential.
In May 1983 Cole changed the name of the SPI holding company to be Ashton Tate, which put the company in the position of having a mail order company "Discount Software" and "Software Distributors" as subsidiaries. The newly re-named holding company promptly sold Discount Software and Software Distributors. Cole negotiated an agreement with Wayne Ratliff in which Ratliff exchanged his future royalty stream on dBASE into equity in Ashton Tate, thereby significantly increasing the profitability of the company.
Cole also took steps to control its technology by creating an in-house development organization (headed by Harvey Jean, formerly of JPL, as VP engineering), and to diversify by funding two outside development teams: Forefront Corporation (the developer of the product that would later be named "Framework") and Queue Associates. That Spring, Ashton Tate released Friday!. By the time of the November 1983 IPO, the company had grown to 228 employees. The IPO raised $14 million. When the fiscal year ended in January 1984, revenues had more than doubled to $43 million and net income had jumped from $1.1 million (fiscal 1983) to $5.3 million.
In May 1984 the company announced, and in July shipped, dBASE III as the successor to dBASE II. July also saw the release of Framework
, an integrated office suite developed by Forefront Corporation and funded by Ashton-Tate. These were the company's first products released with copy protection schemes in an attempt to stop software piracy.
dBASE III was the first release written in the C programming language
to make it easier to support and port to other platforms. To facilitate the rewrite
, an automatic conversion program was used to convert the original Vulcan code from CP/M
Z-80 and DOS 8088 assembly language code into C, which resulted in the beginnings of a difficult to maintain legacy code base that would haunt the company for many years to come. This also had the side effect of making the program run somewhat slower, which was of some concern when it first shipped. As newer machines came out the problem was erased through increased performance of the hardware, and the "problem" simply went away.
In fall 1984 the company had over 500 employees and was taking in $40 million a year in sales, the vast majority of it from dBASE or related utilities.
George Tate died of a heart attack
at the age of 43 on August 10, 1984. David Cole on October 29 announced his resignation and left for Ziff-Davis, leaving Ed Esber
to become CEO. Cole hired Esber because he was the marketing expert who launched VisiCalc
and who built the first distribution channels for personal computer software. (VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet and is credited for sparking the personal computer revolution and was the first commercially successful personal computer software package.)
During Esber's
seven-year tenure, Ashton Tate had its most prosperous years and a few of its most controversial. It is also when Ashton-Tate became one of the "Big Three" personal computer software companies who had weathered the early 1980s "shakeout
", and was considered an equal of Microsoft and Lotus. Under his leadership Ashton-Tate sales grew over 600% from $40M to over $318M.
In November, shortly after Esber
took over, dBASE III version 1.1 was released to correct some of the numerous bugs found in the 1.0 release. As soon as the 1.1 release shipped, development focus turned to the next version, internally referred to as dBASE III version 2.0. Among other things, the 2.0 release would have a new kernel for increased speed, and new functions to improve application development.
Esber's
relationship with Wayne Ratliff, however, was tumultuous, and Ratliff quit several months later. Eventually a group of sales and marketing employees left to join Ratliff at Migent Corporation to compete with Ashton Tate. Later (January 1987), Ashton-Tate would sue Migent for alleged misappropriation of trade secrets. Ratliff would eventually approach Esber
about rejoining Ashton-Tate and insisting on reporting directly to him. Jeb Long took over as dBASE's main architect in Ratliffe's absence.
In October 1985, the company released dBASE III Developer's Edition. Internally this release was known as version 1.2. It had some of the new features expected to be in the upcoming 2.0 release, including the new kernel and features primarily useful to application developers. 1.2 was one of, if not the most stable dBASE versions that Ashton-Tate ever released. Interestingly, it was also one of the least known and most often forgotten. Mostly, it was a release to appease developers waiting for 2.0 (dBASE III+).
In late 1985 the company moved its headquarters to the final location in Torrance
at 20101 Hamilton Avenue in 1985. Development was spread throughout California
, although dBASE development was centered at the Glendale
offices.
dBASE had grown unwieldy over the years, so Esber
started a project under Mike Benson to re-architect dBASE for the new world of client–server software. It was to be a complete rewrite, designed as the next generation dBASE.
dBASE was a complex product, and a thriving third-party industry sprung up to support it. A number of products were introduced to improve certain aspects of dBASE, both programming and day-to-day operations. As Ashton-Tate announced newer versions of dBASE, they would often decide to include some of the functionality provided by the third-parties as features of the base system. Predictably, sales of the third-party version would instantly stop, whether or not the new version of dBASE actually included that feature. After a number of such vaporware
announcements, the third-party developers started becoming upset.
One particularly important addition to the lineup of third-party add-ons was the eventual release of dBASE compiler
s, which would take a dBASE project and compile it and link it into a stand-alone runnable program. This not only made the resulting project easy to distribute to end users, but it did not require dBASE to be installed on that machine. These compilers essentially replaced Ashton-Tate's own solution to this problem, a $395 per-machine "runtime" copy of dBASE, and thereby removed one source of A-T's income. The granddaddy of the compilers was Clipper, from Nantucket Software. Eventually a number of these were developed into full-blown dBASE clones.
Esber
was upset with the companies that cloned dBASE products, but was always supportive of the third-party developers who he viewed as an important part of the dBASE ecosystem. He did not believe nor support companies that cloned dBASE and leveraged the millions of dollars his shareholders had paid to market dBASE. Starting with minor actions, he eventually went to great lengths to stop cloners with cease-and-desist letters and threats of legal action. At one industry conference he even stood up and threatened to sue anyone who made a dBASE clone, shouting "Make my day!". This sparked great debates about the ownership of computer languages and chants of "innovation not litigation".
As a result of this continued conflict, the third-party community slowly moved some of their small business customers away from dBASE. Fortunately for Ashton-Tate, large corporations were standardizing on dBASE.
internally as well as interact with SQL Server
, and would include a compiler
. Ashton-Tate announced dBASE IV in February 1988 with an anticipated release set for July of that year. dBASE IV was eventually released in October 1988 as two products: Standard and Developer's editions.
Unfortunately, dBASE IV was both slow and very buggy. Bugs are not at all that surprising in a major product update, something that would normally be fixed with a "dot-one" release before too much damage was done. This situation had occurred with dBASE III for instance, and Ashton-Tate had quickly fixed the problems. However a number of issues conspired to make the dBASE IV 1.0 release a disaster.
Neither of these issues would, by themselves, kill the product. dBASE had an extremely large following and excellent name recognition. All that was needed was an update that addressed the problems. At the time of its release, there was a general consensus within Ashton-Tate that a bug-fix version would be released within six months of the 1.0 release. If that had happened, the loyal users might have been more accepting of the product.
Rather than do that, Ashton-Tate management instead turned their attention to the next generation of applications, code named Diamond. Diamond was to be a new, integrated product line capable of sharing large sets of data across applications. This effort had been underway for years and was already consuming many of the resources in the company's Glendale, Torrance, Walnut Creek and Los Gatos (Northern California Product Center) offices. However, once it became apparent that Diamond was years away from becoming a product, and with poor reviews and slipping sales of dBASE IV 1.0, Ashton-Tate returned its focus to fixing dBASE IV.
It was almost two years before dBASE IV 1.1 finally shipped (in July 1990). During this time many customers took the opportunity to try out the legions of dBASE clones that had appeared recently, notably FoxBase
and Clipper.
Sales of dBASE had plummeted. The company had about 63% of the overall database market in 1988, and only 43% in 1989. In the final four quarters as a company, Ashton-Tate lost close to $40 million. In August 1989, the company laid off over 400 of its 1,800 employees. The Microsoft partnership for a version called SQL Server dBASE also came to nothing, as dBASE never worked well in this environment, and Microsoft eventually released Access
in this role instead.
, Computer Associates, Informix
, Symantec
and Microsoft
. ( Note: Microsoft would later acquire Fox Software after Borland acquired Ashton-Tate and the United States Department of Justice
forced Borland to not assert ownership of the dBASE language.)
In 1990 Esber proposed a merger with Borland. During the first discussions, the board backed out and dismissed Esber thinking him crazy to entertain a merger of equals (combining the companies at existing market valuations) with the smaller competitor Borland, and on February 11, 1991 replaced him as CEO with William P. "Bill" Lyons. Lyons had been hired to run the non-dBASE business and heretofore had been unsuccessful. Lyons would ship dBASE IV 1.1, a product Esber managed and was already in beta when let go.
After giving the board a merger compensation package (including individual bonuses of $250 thousand) and giving the management team repriced options and golden parachute
s, the board and Lyons reinitiated discussions with Borland, but this time structured as a take-over of Ashton-Tate with a significant premium over Ashton-Tate's current market valuation.
Wall Street
liked the deal and Borland stock would reach new highs shortly before and after the merger. Some considered the $439 million in stock they paid to be too much. Kahn, ceo of Borland apparently did not consult with his management team prior to committing to acquire Ashton Tate over a weekend visit to Los Angeles.
The Borland merger was not a smooth one. Borland had been marketing the Paradox
database specifically to compete with dBASE, and its programmers considered their system to be far superior to dBASE. The Paradox group was extremely upset whenever Philippe Kahn
, Borland's CEO, so much as mentioned dBASE, and an intense turf war
broke out within the company. Borland was also developing a competitor product called The Borland dBase Compiler for Windows. This product was designed by Gregor Freund who led a small team developing this fast, object-oriented version of dBASE. It was when Borland showed the product to the Ashton-Tate team that they finally conceded that they had lost the battle for dBASE.
Nevertheless, Kahn was observant of the trends in the computer market, and decided that both products should be moved forward to become truly Microsoft Windows
-based. The OO-dBASE compiler was no more able to run under Windows than was dBASE IV, causing Borland to abandon both code bases in 1993 and spin up a new team to create a new product, eventually delivered as dBASE for Windows in 1994. Meanwhile Paradox was deliberately down-played in the developer market since dBASE was now the largest Borland product. Microsoft introduced Access in late 1992, and eventually took over almost all of the Windows database market. Further, in the summer of 1992 Microsoft acquired Ohio-based Fox Software, makers of the dBASE-like products FoxBASE+ and FoxPro
. With Microsoft behind FoxPro, many dBASE and Clipper software developers would start working in FoxPro instead. By the time dBASE for Windows was released, the market hardly noticed. Microsoft appears to have neglected FoxPro subsequent to the acquisition, perhaps because they also owned and promoted Microsoft Access, a direct competitor to dBASE. Certainly, the PC database market became a great deal less competitive as a result of their deal to buy FoxPro.
When Borland eventually sold its Quattro Pro
and Paradox products to Novell, where they would be joined with Word Perfect in an attempt to match Microsoft Office, Borland was left with InterBase
, which Esber had purchased in the late 1980s and had its origins as a derivative of the RDB
database work at DEC
. Borland's ongoing strategy was to refocus its development tools on the corporate market with client–server applications, so Interbase fitted in as a low-end tool and a good generic SQL database for prototyping. This proved to be the longest lasting and most positive part of the Ashton-Tate acquisition, ironic since it was almost an oversight and little known to Borland until they acquired Ashton-Tate.
Overall, the Ashton-Tate purchase proved to be unsuccessful. Several years later, Philippe Kahn would leave Borland amidst declining financial performance including many years of losses.
Any one of these would have been a surmountable problem, but combined they brought about the swift decline of the company.
Ashton-Tate's dependence on dBASE is understandable. It was one of the earliest killer application
s in the CP/M
world, along with WordStar
and (on other platforms) VisiCalc
, and was able to make the transition to the IBM PC
to maintain its dominance. Its success alone is what created and sustained the company through the first nine years. However, the over reliance on dBASE for revenue had a catastrophic effect on the company when dBASE IV sales tanked.
In the end, the poor quality and extremely late release of dBASE IV drove existing customers away and kept new ones from accepting it. This loss of revenue for the cash cow
was too much for the company to bear, and combined with management missteps, eventually lead to the sale to the upstart Borland International.
of its day.
. Framework, like dBASE before it, was the brainchild of a single author, Robert Carr
, who felt that integrated applications offered huge benefits over a selection of separate apps doing the same thing. In 1983 he had a runnable demo of his product, and showed it to Ashton-Tate who immediately signed a deal to support development in exchange for marketing rights.
Framework was an integrated DOS
-based office suite that combined a word processor
, spreadsheet
, mini-database application
, outliner
, charting tool, and a terminal program. Later versions also added e-mail support. Framework also had the distinction of being available in over 14 languages. Although DOS based, Framework supported a fully functional GUI
based on character graphics (similar to Borland's OWL
).
Framework eventually got locked into an industry battle, primarily with Lotus Symphony, and later with Microsoft Works
. The market was never large to begin with, as most customers chose to purchase the large, monolithic versions of applications even if they never used the extra functionality. Borland later sold Framework to Selections & Functions, who continue to sell it today.
was a word processor
package created to copy the basic operation of a Wang
dedicated word processor workstation on the PC. In the early 1980s many companies used MultiMate to replace these expensive systems with PCs, MultiMate offering them an easy migration path. Although it wasn't clear at the time, this migration was largely complete by the time Ashton-Tate bought the company in December 1985. Sales had plateaued, although they were still fairly impressive at the time.
What was originally a deliberate attempt to copy the Wang's system now made the product seem hopelessly outdated, and it would require a major upgrade to remain useful. WordPerfect
took advantage of these issues and took market share to a degree essentially lethal for MultiMate.
programs being so poor at charting that people would gladly pay for another program to improve on them. By the time Ashton-Tate purchased the company it was clear that newer generations of spreadsheet programs would improve their charting abilities to the point where the Decision Resource products wouldn't really be needed, but the company was also working on a new drawing package that was more interesting in the long run.
After the purchase was completed it became clear that the drawing product was inadequate. Although it was released as Draw Applause it never sold well.
approach taken by Aldus
PageMaker and Ventura Publisher, which became more popular as windowing systems and GUIs
became more common. Also, as time went on more and more so-called desktop publishing features were added to popular word processing software, probably reducing the market for such a low-end desktop publishing program. Oddly, Byline was written in the Forth programming language.
The most recent release of Rapidfile was version 1.2 released in 1986, with versions available in several languages including English, French and Dutch. Although Rapidfile was created for the DOS operating system, information is available http://www.rapidfile.co.uk/ to show that it can be persuaded to work reasonably well in the DOS box of Microsoft Windows 95, 98, 2000 and XP, and also under GNU/Linux using the DOSemu http://www.dosemu.org/ emulation software.
As early as the winter of 1984, only a few months after the Mac's introduction, the company purchased a small Mac database developer and moved them to their Glendale development center to work on what would later be known as dBASE Mac
. Soon after this, in early 1985, they agreed to fund development of a spreadsheet
program being developed by Randy Wigginton
, former project lead of MacWrite
. Years later they added a "high-end" word processor
from Ann Arbor Softworks, who were in the midst of a rather public debacle while trying to release FullWrite Professional
which was now almost a year late.
Ed Esber and Apple Computer chairman John Sculley
jointly announced Ashton Tate's family of Mac products in Palo Alto. dBASE Mac finally shipped in September 1987, but it was dBASE in name only. Users were dismayed to learn that in order to interact with their major investment in dBASE on the PC, their applications would have to be re-written from scratch. Adding to their frustration was the fact that it crashed a lot and was extremely slow. Given that the program was really a completely new Mac-only system, it had to compete with other Mac-only database systems like 4th Dimension
, Helix
and FileMaker
.
FullWrite and Full Impact were released in 1988. Both were liked by reviewers and had leading edge features. FullWrite was an outstanding product, while Full Impact had the bad luck of being timed just after a major new release of Microsoft Excel
and the release of Informix Wingz
.
All three products were excellent at their core, but were really not viewed as a family and needed to link together more cleanly. They all also needed a solid follow-up release to address some of the bugs and performance issues. However, no major upgrades ever shipped for either FullWrite or dBASE Mac, and the only major upgrade to FullImpact shipped a full two years after release. Releases of Microsoft Word
and Excel soon closed some of the feature gaps, and as the Mac OS
changed the products became increasingly difficult to run. Microsoft embarked on a campaign in earnest to discredit and kill Ashton-Tate's products, at one point exaggerating the system requirements for FullWrite, and going so far as to delete Ashton Tate software from Mac dealers demonstration computers.
FullWrite was later sold off by Borland in 1994 to Akimbo Systems, but by that time Microsoft Word
had taken over the entire market and they too eventually gave up on it. dBASE Mac was sold off in 1990 and re-released as nuBASE, but it was no more successful and was gone within a year. Full Impact simply disappeared.
, the system normally relies on the underlying network software to deliver entire files to the user's desktop machine where the actual query work is carried out. This creates heavy load on the network, as each user "pulls down" the database files, often to do the same query over and over. In contrast, a client–server system receives only small commands from the user's machine, processes the command locally on the server, and the returns only those results the user was looking for. Overall network use is dramatically lowered.
A client–server database is a fundamentally different sort of system than a traditional single-user system like dBASE, and although they share many features in common, it is typically not a simple task to take an existing single-user product and turn it into a true client–server system. As the business world became increasingly networked, Ashton-Tate's system would become irrelevant without updating to the client server era.
Ed Esber and Bill Gates
introduced SQL Server
to the world in a joint New York press conference. The basic idea was to use SQL Server as a back-end and dBASE as the front-end, allowing the existing dBASE market to use their forms and programming knowledge on top of a SQL system. SQL Server was actually a product developed by Sybase
corporation, which Microsoft had licensed. From a business perspective this had little direct effect on the company, at least in the short term.
dBASE continued to sell well, and the company eventually peaked at $318M in yearly sales. During this period, Esber hired some of the most brilliant database engineers in the industry, including Dr. Moshe Zloof from IBM, Harry Wong, and Mike Benson (who would later head Esber's efforts to rebuild a new dBASE).
".
Esber had previously decided to sue one of the clone companies involved, then known as Fox Software. By the time the case worked its way to court in 1990, Fox Software had released FoxPro
and was busy increasing market share. If the court case was successful, Ashton-Tate could stop FoxPro and use the precedent to stop the other clones as well, allowing dBASE to regain a footing and recover from the dBASE IV incident.
These hopes came to an end when the case was thrown out of court. During the initial proceedings it was learned that dBASE's file format and language had been based on a mainframe
product used at JPL, where Ratliff had been working when he first created Vulcan. The credibility of Ratliff was jeopardized by his alternate claims of ownership while at Ashton Tate and then supporting the roots at JPL after he left. All the facts were never sorted out and Ashton-Tate's competitors had a self-interest motivated field day in writing amicus briefs.
When the federal judge reviewed the work of his clerks he overturned his earlier ruling, and decided to hear the case on whether or not Ashton-Tate owned the language. Unfortunately, his earlier ruling had already done considerable damage. Eventually, as part of the merger with Borland, the U.S. Justice Department required Borland to not assert copyright claims in menu commands and the command language of dBASE.
Various articles describe the original mail-order company as being named Discount Software, while others call it Software Plus. (Both are correct, as they were different companies. Discount Software sold directly to consumers, while Software Plus was a distributor to VAR's and other resellers. George Tate also had a third company at the time he started Ashton-Tate, a small retail store chain called Softwaire Centre. That name would linger on for many years after the stores were no longer connected to George Tate and/or Ashton-Tate.)
Los Angeles advertising consultant Hal Pawluk named their first product dBASE II, as if it were a new and improved version. Hal also created a famous and controversial early dBASE magazine ad that read in part: "We all know that bilge pumps suck. And by now, we've found out -- the hard way -- that a lot of software seems to work the same way." After the initial release of the advertisement, Ashton-Tate received a letter from the manufacturer of the bilge pump pictured in the ad. George Tate wrote back to the manufacturer, offering to print a retraction that said their pump did NOT suck. No further correspondence from the pump manufacturer was ever received.
The accurate Ed Esber quote to Wayne Ratliff is: "Everyone in Ashton Tate is important including the person who doesn't damage or drop our products while loading the boxes onto the truck to ship to our customers."
George Tate and a number of early Ashton-Tate employees were Scientologists.
Tom Rettig
, known for his work on the Lassie
TV series, worked in the tech support department at Ashton-Tate.
The author Douglas Adams
was a keen user of Fullwrite and complained about the marketing of the product to Ashton-Tate's UK Managing Director Paul Sloane
who is now an author of books on lateral thinking puzzles and leadership.
In the early years of microcomputer software, any database product (such as dBASE II) that could link together two or more data files was often advertised to be "relational", even though by that time the term "relational database" had been given a much more rigorous definition in the academic world.
An early version of dBASE II included a license agreement that said the buyer had the right to use the software for 99 years. This was later cited by long-time PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak in a collection of software license oddities.
dBASE and InterBase continue to be developed and sold separately. dBASE Plus is available through dataBased Intelligence, Inc. InterBase continues to be improved and sold by CodeGear. An open source variant of this database named Firebird
also exists.
At one point in the late 1980s, the then president of Ashton-Tate (Esber was CEO) proclaimed that every product would need to bring in at least 10% of the company's revenue or be dropped. This statement had the immediate effect of limiting the company to 10 products or fewer. Further, with dBASE bringing in about 70% of the revenue, the other product managers quickly convinced the president to drop the requirement.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
based software company best known for developing the popular dBASE
DBASE
dBase II was the first widely used database management system for microcomputers. It was originally published by Ashton-Tate for CP/M, and later on ported to the Apple II and IBM PC under DOS...
database application
Database application
A database application is a computer program whose primary purpose is entering and retrieving information from a computer-managed database. Early examples of database applications were accounting systems and airline reservations systems, such as SABRE, developed starting in 1957.A characteristic of...
. Ashton-Tate grew from a small garage-based company to become a multinational corporation. Once one of the "Big Three" software companies, which included Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
and Lotus
Lotus Software
Lotus Software is a software company with headquarters in Westford, Massachusetts...
, the company stumbled and was later sold to Borland
Borland
Borland Software Corporation is a software company first headquartered in Scotts Valley, California, Cupertino, California and finally Austin, Texas. It is now a Micro Focus subsidiary. It was founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn.-The 1980s:...
in September 1991.
History
The history of Ashton-Tate and dBASE are intertwined and as such, must be discussed in parallel.Early History: dBASE II (1981–1983)
Ashton-Tate was launched as a result of George Tate and Hal Lashlee having found and licensed a database program called Vulcan from its author, Wayne Ratliff, in 1981. The original agreement was written on one page, and called for simple, generous royalty payments to Ratliff. Wayne RatliffWayne Ratliff
Cecil Wayne Ratliff wrote the database program Vulcan. Raised in Ohio and Germany, he now resides in the Los Angeles area....
had written Vulcan to help run an office football pool at his day job at JPL. Vulcan was a database application
Database application
A database application is a computer program whose primary purpose is entering and retrieving information from a computer-managed database. Early examples of database applications were accounting systems and airline reservations systems, such as SABRE, developed starting in 1957.A characteristic of...
that ran on the CP/M
CP/M
CP/M was a mass-market operating system created for Intel 8080/85 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc...
operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
, and was modeled on JPL/DIS, a Univac
UNIVAC
UNIVAC is the name of a business unit and division of the Remington Rand company formed by the 1950 purchase of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, founded four years earlier by ENIAC inventors J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, and the associated line of computers which continues to this day...
1106 program used at JPL and written by fellow programmer Jeb Long.
Tate and Lashlee had already built two successful start-up companies by this time - Discount Software (whose president was Ron Dennis), which was one of the first to sell PC software programs through the mail to consumers, and Software Distributors (acting CEO at the time was Linda Johnson), (later re-named SofTeam)- which was one of the first wholesale distributors of PC software in the world.
The founders changed the name of Vulcan to "dBASE II" on the recommendation of Hal Pawluk, an advertising expert who single-handedly drove and ran the early advertising programs for dBASE. His idea was that naming the first release of the product "II" would imply that it was already in its second version, and therefore would be perceived as being more reliable than a first release. The original manual was too complex from Pawluk's perspective, so he wrote a second manual, which was duly included in the package along with the first. Pawluck created the name for the new publishing company by combining George's last name with the fictional name Ashton (purportedly because it was felt that "Ashton-Tate" sounded better, or was easier to pronounce, than "Lashlee-Tate"). Later, David Cole bought a parrot and named it Ashton, because people kept calling the company asking to speak to Mr Ashton.
In 1981 the founders hired David Cole to be the chairman, president and CEO of their group of companies. The group was called "Software Plus." It did not trade under its own name, but was a holding company for the three startups: Discount Software, Software Distributors, and Ashton-Tate. Cole was given free rein to run the businesses, while George Tate primarily remained involved in Ashton-Tate. Lashlee was somewhat less involved on a day-to-day basis in Ashton-Tate by this time, although he was always aware of and up to speed on all three of the businesses, and was an active board member and officer of SPI.
In June of 1982 Cole hired Rod Turner as the director of OEM sales for Ashton-Tate. In a few weeks Turner solved a sales commission plan issue, that had been bothering George Tate for some time, with the top performing salesperson (Barbara Weingarten, now Guerra), and Tate and Cole promoted Turner to be Vice President of world-wide sales three weeks after his initial hire. Turner was approximately the 12th employee of Ashton Tate. Since the company was truly boot-strapped (ie no external venture capital), the founders did not make a practice of hiring experienced veterans, and most of the team at Ashton-Tate were young and enthusiastic but inexperienced. Jim Taylor was responsible for product management in the early days, and worked closely with Wayne Ratliff and the other key developers on dBASE II. In 1982 Perry Lawrence and Nelson Tso were the two developers who were employed at Ashton-Tate, while Wayne Ratliff employed Jeb Long from his royalty stream.
In the period prior to volume shipments of the IBM PC (which was announced on August 11, 1981, with volume shipments occurring by fall 1982), the most popular microcomputer operating system was CP/M. dBASE II was launched on CP/M and achieved good success on it, priced at $700 per copy (per PC). The CP/M market was fragmented, with many hardware companies and nascent channels. dBASE II was ported to the IBM PC (ie the MS-DOS operating system) and shipped in September of 1982. Pawluk ran advertisements promoting dBASE II for the IBM PC for months before it shipped. When dBASE II for the IBM PC shipped, it was one of few major applications available on the PC, and that fact, combined with good promotion and sales in the US and internationally, caused dBASE II sales to grow rapidly. Turner expanded Aston-Tate's international distribution efforts and encouraged exclusive distributors in major markets to translate dBASE II from English to non-English versions. The early presence of dBASE II in international markets, as IBM rolled out the PC in those markets, facilitated rapid growth in sales and market share for dBASE. At one point in 1983, the company's French distributor "La Command Electronique" (whose owner was Hughes LeBlanc) claimed that "one in ten buyers of a PC in France is buying dBASE II."
In the winter of 1982, Turner recruited the managing director (David Imberg) for Ashton-Tate's first subsidiary, Ashton-Tate UK. Turner set a goal for Imberg of achieving 15% per month compound revenue growth in the first 18 months (using the prior UK distributor's volume as a starting point), which Imberg accomplished. When Turner brought Imberg to the Culver City, California corporate headquarters of Ashton-Tate to be trained, the offices were so crowded that the only space available for Imberg was a small desk beside a large photocopier, with no phone line; the offices were so crowded that when Turner needed to conduct a confidential meeting, he would have it standing up in the nearby restroom.
With the growing popularity of ever-larger hard drives on personal computers, dBASE II turned out to be a huge seller. For its time, dBASE was extremely advanced. It was one of the first database products that ran on a microcomputer
Microcomputer
A microcomputer is a computer with a microprocessor as its central processing unit. They are physically small compared to mainframe and minicomputers...
, and its programming environment (the dBASE language) allowed it to be used to build a wide variety of custom applications. Although microcomputers had limited memory and storage at the time, dBASE nevertheless allowed a huge number of small-to-medium sized tasks to be automated. The value-added resellers (VARs) who developed applications using dBASE became an important early sales channel for dBASE.
By the end of the fiscal year ending in January 1982, the firm had revenues of almost $3.7 million with an operating loss of $313 thousand.
Among Cole's early acts was to hire an accountant to set up a financial system, install a management structure, and introduce processes to manage operations and orders. Cole's mission was "to shift the balance of power from those who understand how computers work to those who need what computers can do."
Cole licensed two products in 1982, building on his publishing background. These two unsuccessful products were launched in October 1982: The Financial Planner and The Bottom Line Strategist. The Financial Planner was a sophisticated financial modeling system that used its own internal language - but it was not as widely appealing as spreadsheets like SuperCalc. The Bottom Line Strategist was a template financial analysis system that had very limited flexibility and function. Both were released at the same price as dBASE II, but neither product was aggressively marketed, and both were put into a benign-neglect mode by Turner when it became clear that they did not have sizable potential.
Ashton-Tate: IPO and dBASE III (1983–1985)
By the end of January 1983, the company was profitable. In February 1983 the company released dBASE II RunTime, which allowed developers to write dBASE applications and then distribute them to customers without them needing to purchase the "full" version of dBASE. The growth in revenues was matched by a growth in employees. The company hired its first Human Resources manager, put together its first benefits package, and moved headquarters to 10150 West Jefferson Boulevard in Culver City.In May 1983 Cole changed the name of the SPI holding company to be Ashton Tate, which put the company in the position of having a mail order company "Discount Software" and "Software Distributors" as subsidiaries. The newly re-named holding company promptly sold Discount Software and Software Distributors. Cole negotiated an agreement with Wayne Ratliff in which Ratliff exchanged his future royalty stream on dBASE into equity in Ashton Tate, thereby significantly increasing the profitability of the company.
Cole also took steps to control its technology by creating an in-house development organization (headed by Harvey Jean, formerly of JPL, as VP engineering), and to diversify by funding two outside development teams: Forefront Corporation (the developer of the product that would later be named "Framework") and Queue Associates. That Spring, Ashton Tate released Friday!. By the time of the November 1983 IPO, the company had grown to 228 employees. The IPO raised $14 million. When the fiscal year ended in January 1984, revenues had more than doubled to $43 million and net income had jumped from $1.1 million (fiscal 1983) to $5.3 million.
In May 1984 the company announced, and in July shipped, dBASE III as the successor to dBASE II. July also saw the release of Framework
Framework (office suite)
Framework, launched in 1984, was the first office suite to run on the PC 8086 with DOS operating system. ValDocs, an even earlier integrated suite, actually comparable to the original Macintosh of 1984 and Apple Lisa of 1982 was produced by Epson, a complete integrated work station based on the...
, an integrated office suite developed by Forefront Corporation and funded by Ashton-Tate. These were the company's first products released with copy protection schemes in an attempt to stop software piracy.
dBASE III was the first release written in the C programming language
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
to make it easier to support and port to other platforms. To facilitate the rewrite
Rewrite (programming)
A rewrite in computer programming is the act or result of re-implementing a large portion of existing functionality without re-use of its source code. When the rewrite is not using existing code at all, it is common to speak of a rewrite from scratch...
, an automatic conversion program was used to convert the original Vulcan code from CP/M
CP/M
CP/M was a mass-market operating system created for Intel 8080/85 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc...
Z-80 and DOS 8088 assembly language code into C, which resulted in the beginnings of a difficult to maintain legacy code base that would haunt the company for many years to come. This also had the side effect of making the program run somewhat slower, which was of some concern when it first shipped. As newer machines came out the problem was erased through increased performance of the hardware, and the "problem" simply went away.
In fall 1984 the company had over 500 employees and was taking in $40 million a year in sales, the vast majority of it from dBASE or related utilities.
George Tate died of a heart attack
Myocardial infarction
Myocardial infarction or acute myocardial infarction , commonly known as a heart attack, results from the interruption of blood supply to a part of the heart, causing heart cells to die...
at the age of 43 on August 10, 1984. David Cole on October 29 announced his resignation and left for Ziff-Davis, leaving Ed Esber
Ed Esber
Edward M. Esber, Jr. is the former CEO of Ashton-Tate and initiated its subsequent sale to Borland. Esber joined VisiCorp --as Exec VP of Sales and Marketing...
to become CEO. Cole hired Esber because he was the marketing expert who launched VisiCalc
VisiCalc
VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program available for personal computers. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool...
and who built the first distribution channels for personal computer software. (VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet and is credited for sparking the personal computer revolution and was the first commercially successful personal computer software package.)
During Esber's
Ed Esber
Edward M. Esber, Jr. is the former CEO of Ashton-Tate and initiated its subsequent sale to Borland. Esber joined VisiCorp --as Exec VP of Sales and Marketing...
seven-year tenure, Ashton Tate had its most prosperous years and a few of its most controversial. It is also when Ashton-Tate became one of the "Big Three" personal computer software companies who had weathered the early 1980s "shakeout
Shakeout
Shakeout is a term used in business and economics to describe the consolidation of an industry or sector, in which businesses are eliminated or acquired through competition...
", and was considered an equal of Microsoft and Lotus. Under his leadership Ashton-Tate sales grew over 600% from $40M to over $318M.
In November, shortly after Esber
Ed Esber
Edward M. Esber, Jr. is the former CEO of Ashton-Tate and initiated its subsequent sale to Borland. Esber joined VisiCorp --as Exec VP of Sales and Marketing...
took over, dBASE III version 1.1 was released to correct some of the numerous bugs found in the 1.0 release. As soon as the 1.1 release shipped, development focus turned to the next version, internally referred to as dBASE III version 2.0. Among other things, the 2.0 release would have a new kernel for increased speed, and new functions to improve application development.
Esber's
Ed Esber
Edward M. Esber, Jr. is the former CEO of Ashton-Tate and initiated its subsequent sale to Borland. Esber joined VisiCorp --as Exec VP of Sales and Marketing...
relationship with Wayne Ratliff, however, was tumultuous, and Ratliff quit several months later. Eventually a group of sales and marketing employees left to join Ratliff at Migent Corporation to compete with Ashton Tate. Later (January 1987), Ashton-Tate would sue Migent for alleged misappropriation of trade secrets. Ratliff would eventually approach Esber
Ed Esber
Edward M. Esber, Jr. is the former CEO of Ashton-Tate and initiated its subsequent sale to Borland. Esber joined VisiCorp --as Exec VP of Sales and Marketing...
about rejoining Ashton-Tate and insisting on reporting directly to him. Jeb Long took over as dBASE's main architect in Ratliffe's absence.
In October 1985, the company released dBASE III Developer's Edition. Internally this release was known as version 1.2. It had some of the new features expected to be in the upcoming 2.0 release, including the new kernel and features primarily useful to application developers. 1.2 was one of, if not the most stable dBASE versions that Ashton-Tate ever released. Interestingly, it was also one of the least known and most often forgotten. Mostly, it was a release to appease developers waiting for 2.0 (dBASE III+).
In late 1985 the company moved its headquarters to the final location in Torrance
Torrance, California
Torrance is a city incorporated in 1921 and located in the South Bay region of Los Angeles County, California, United States. Torrance has of shore-front beaches on the Pacific Ocean, quieter and less well-known by tourists than others on the Santa Monica Bay, such as those of neighboring...
at 20101 Hamilton Avenue in 1985. Development was spread throughout California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, although dBASE development was centered at the Glendale
Glendale, California
Glendale is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. As of the 2010 Census, the city population is 191,719, down from 194,973 at the 2000 census. making it the third largest city in Los Angeles County and the 22nd largest city in the state of California...
offices.
dBASE III+ and 3rd Party Clones (1986–1987)
dBASE III+, a version including character-based menus for improved ease-of-use, had troubles maturing and had to be recalled just prior to its release in early 1986 due to an incorrect setting in the copy-protection scheme. However the company handled this with some aplomb, and although some customers were affected, Ashton-Tate's handling of the problems did much to improve customer relations rather than sour them. dBASE III+ would go on to be just as successful as dBASE II had been, powering the company to $300 million in sales in 1987.dBASE had grown unwieldy over the years, so Esber
Ed Esber
Edward M. Esber, Jr. is the former CEO of Ashton-Tate and initiated its subsequent sale to Borland. Esber joined VisiCorp --as Exec VP of Sales and Marketing...
started a project under Mike Benson to re-architect dBASE for the new world of client–server software. It was to be a complete rewrite, designed as the next generation dBASE.
dBASE was a complex product, and a thriving third-party industry sprung up to support it. A number of products were introduced to improve certain aspects of dBASE, both programming and day-to-day operations. As Ashton-Tate announced newer versions of dBASE, they would often decide to include some of the functionality provided by the third-parties as features of the base system. Predictably, sales of the third-party version would instantly stop, whether or not the new version of dBASE actually included that feature. After a number of such vaporware
Vaporware
Vaporware is a term in the computer industry that describes a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is never actually released nor officially canceled. Vaporware is also a term sometimes used to describe events that are announced or predicted,...
announcements, the third-party developers started becoming upset.
One particularly important addition to the lineup of third-party add-ons was the eventual release of dBASE compiler
Compiler
A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...
s, which would take a dBASE project and compile it and link it into a stand-alone runnable program. This not only made the resulting project easy to distribute to end users, but it did not require dBASE to be installed on that machine. These compilers essentially replaced Ashton-Tate's own solution to this problem, a $395 per-machine "runtime" copy of dBASE, and thereby removed one source of A-T's income. The granddaddy of the compilers was Clipper, from Nantucket Software. Eventually a number of these were developed into full-blown dBASE clones.
Esber
Ed Esber
Edward M. Esber, Jr. is the former CEO of Ashton-Tate and initiated its subsequent sale to Borland. Esber joined VisiCorp --as Exec VP of Sales and Marketing...
was upset with the companies that cloned dBASE products, but was always supportive of the third-party developers who he viewed as an important part of the dBASE ecosystem. He did not believe nor support companies that cloned dBASE and leveraged the millions of dollars his shareholders had paid to market dBASE. Starting with minor actions, he eventually went to great lengths to stop cloners with cease-and-desist letters and threats of legal action. At one industry conference he even stood up and threatened to sue anyone who made a dBASE clone, shouting "Make my day!". This sparked great debates about the ownership of computer languages and chants of "innovation not litigation".
As a result of this continued conflict, the third-party community slowly moved some of their small business customers away from dBASE. Fortunately for Ashton-Tate, large corporations were standardizing on dBASE.
dBASE IV: Decline and fall (1988–1990)
Ashton-Tate had been promising a new version of the core dBASE product line starting around 1986. The new version was going to be more powerful, faster, easier to create databases with, improved indexes, networkable, support SQLSQL
SQL is a programming language designed for managing data in relational database management systems ....
internally as well as interact with SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database server, developed by Microsoft: It is a software product whose primary function is to store and retrieve data as requested by other software applications, be it those on the same computer or those running on another computer across a network...
, and would include a compiler
Compiler
A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...
. Ashton-Tate announced dBASE IV in February 1988 with an anticipated release set for July of that year. dBASE IV was eventually released in October 1988 as two products: Standard and Developer's editions.
Unfortunately, dBASE IV was both slow and very buggy. Bugs are not at all that surprising in a major product update, something that would normally be fixed with a "dot-one" release before too much damage was done. This situation had occurred with dBASE III for instance, and Ashton-Tate had quickly fixed the problems. However a number of issues conspired to make the dBASE IV 1.0 release a disaster.
- For one, while dBASE IV did include a compiler, it was not what the developer community was expecting. That community was looking for a product that would generate stand-alone, executable code, similar to Clipper. The dBASE IV compiler did produce object codeObject codeObject code, or sometimes object module, is what a computer compiler produces. In a general sense object code is a sequence of statements in a computer language, usually a machine code language....
, but still required the full dBASE IV product to run the result. Many believed that Ashton-Tate intended dBASE IV to compete with and eliminate the third-party developers. The announcement alone did much to upset the livelihood of the various compiler authors.
- More problematic however was the instability of the program. The full scale of the problem only became obvious as more people attempted to use the product, especially those who upgraded to the new version. The bugs were so numerous that most users gave up, resigned to wait for a dot-one release. As word got out, sales slumped as existing users chose to hold off on their upgrades, and new users chose to ignore the product.
Neither of these issues would, by themselves, kill the product. dBASE had an extremely large following and excellent name recognition. All that was needed was an update that addressed the problems. At the time of its release, there was a general consensus within Ashton-Tate that a bug-fix version would be released within six months of the 1.0 release. If that had happened, the loyal users might have been more accepting of the product.
Rather than do that, Ashton-Tate management instead turned their attention to the next generation of applications, code named Diamond. Diamond was to be a new, integrated product line capable of sharing large sets of data across applications. This effort had been underway for years and was already consuming many of the resources in the company's Glendale, Torrance, Walnut Creek and Los Gatos (Northern California Product Center) offices. However, once it became apparent that Diamond was years away from becoming a product, and with poor reviews and slipping sales of dBASE IV 1.0, Ashton-Tate returned its focus to fixing dBASE IV.
It was almost two years before dBASE IV 1.1 finally shipped (in July 1990). During this time many customers took the opportunity to try out the legions of dBASE clones that had appeared recently, notably FoxBase
Visual FoxPro
Visual FoxPro is a data-centric object-oriented and procedural programming language produced by Microsoft. It is derived from FoxPro which was developed by Fox Software beginning in 1984. Fox Technologies merged with Microsoft in 1992, after which the software acquired further features and the...
and Clipper.
Sales of dBASE had plummeted. The company had about 63% of the overall database market in 1988, and only 43% in 1989. In the final four quarters as a company, Ashton-Tate lost close to $40 million. In August 1989, the company laid off over 400 of its 1,800 employees. The Microsoft partnership for a version called SQL Server dBASE also came to nothing, as dBASE never worked well in this environment, and Microsoft eventually released Access
Microsoft Access
Microsoft Office Access, previously known as Microsoft Access, is a relational database management system from Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software-development tools. It is a member of the Microsoft Office suite of...
in this role instead.
Sale to Borland (1991)
Esber had been trying to grow the company for years via acquisitions or combining forces with other software companies, including merger discussions with Lotus in 1985 and again in 1989. Ashton-Tate's strategically inept board passed up numerous opportunities for industry-changing mergers. Other merger discussions that Ashton-Tate's board rejected or reached an impasse on included CullinetCullinet
Cullinet was a software company whose products included the database management system IDMS and the integrated software package Goldengate. In 1989, the company was bought by Computer Associates...
, Computer Associates, Informix
Informix
IBM Informix is a family of relational database management system developed by IBM. It is positioned as IBM's flagship data server for online transaction processing as well as integrated solutions...
, Symantec
Symantec
Symantec Corporation is the largest maker of security software for computers. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and is a Fortune 500 company and a member of the S&P 500 stock market index.-History:...
and Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
. ( Note: Microsoft would later acquire Fox Software after Borland acquired Ashton-Tate and the United States Department of Justice
United States Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice , is the United States federal executive department responsible for the enforcement of the law and administration of justice, equivalent to the justice or interior ministries of other countries.The Department is led by the Attorney General, who is nominated...
forced Borland to not assert ownership of the dBASE language.)
In 1990 Esber proposed a merger with Borland. During the first discussions, the board backed out and dismissed Esber thinking him crazy to entertain a merger of equals (combining the companies at existing market valuations) with the smaller competitor Borland, and on February 11, 1991 replaced him as CEO with William P. "Bill" Lyons. Lyons had been hired to run the non-dBASE business and heretofore had been unsuccessful. Lyons would ship dBASE IV 1.1, a product Esber managed and was already in beta when let go.
After giving the board a merger compensation package (including individual bonuses of $250 thousand) and giving the management team repriced options and golden parachute
Golden parachute
A golden parachute is an agreement between a company and an employee specifying that the employee will receive certain significant benefits if employment is terminated. Sometimes, certain conditions, typically a change in company ownership, must be met, but often the cause of termination is...
s, the board and Lyons reinitiated discussions with Borland, but this time structured as a take-over of Ashton-Tate with a significant premium over Ashton-Tate's current market valuation.
Wall Street
Wall Street
Wall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the eight-block-long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in Lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or...
liked the deal and Borland stock would reach new highs shortly before and after the merger. Some considered the $439 million in stock they paid to be too much. Kahn, ceo of Borland apparently did not consult with his management team prior to committing to acquire Ashton Tate over a weekend visit to Los Angeles.
The Borland merger was not a smooth one. Borland had been marketing the Paradox
Paradox (database)
Paradox is a relational database management system currently published by Corel Corporation. It was originally released for DOS by Ansa Software, and then by Borland after it bought the company...
database specifically to compete with dBASE, and its programmers considered their system to be far superior to dBASE. The Paradox group was extremely upset whenever Philippe Kahn
Philippe Kahn
Philippe Kahn is a technology innovator and entrepreneur, who is credited with creating the first camera phone solution sharing pictures instantly on public networks. Kahn's first publicly shared picture is unique in that no other teams making the claim have any pictures. Kahn shot the first camera...
, Borland's CEO, so much as mentioned dBASE, and an intense turf war
Turf war
According to Wordnet the definition of a turf war is "a bitter struggle for territory or power or control or rights". For example: a turf war erupted between street gangs; the president's resignation was the result of a turf war with the board of directors. In larger companies Turf wars could...
broke out within the company. Borland was also developing a competitor product called The Borland dBase Compiler for Windows. This product was designed by Gregor Freund who led a small team developing this fast, object-oriented version of dBASE. It was when Borland showed the product to the Ashton-Tate team that they finally conceded that they had lost the battle for dBASE.
Nevertheless, Kahn was observant of the trends in the computer market, and decided that both products should be moved forward to become truly Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
-based. The OO-dBASE compiler was no more able to run under Windows than was dBASE IV, causing Borland to abandon both code bases in 1993 and spin up a new team to create a new product, eventually delivered as dBASE for Windows in 1994. Meanwhile Paradox was deliberately down-played in the developer market since dBASE was now the largest Borland product. Microsoft introduced Access in late 1992, and eventually took over almost all of the Windows database market. Further, in the summer of 1992 Microsoft acquired Ohio-based Fox Software, makers of the dBASE-like products FoxBASE+ and FoxPro
FoxPro
' has two meanings:*Visual FoxPro, an object-oriented programming language and RDBMS, published by Microsoft, for Microsoft Windows*FoxPro 2, a text-based procedural programming language and DBMS, originally published by Fox Software and later by Microsoft, for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, Macintosh,...
. With Microsoft behind FoxPro, many dBASE and Clipper software developers would start working in FoxPro instead. By the time dBASE for Windows was released, the market hardly noticed. Microsoft appears to have neglected FoxPro subsequent to the acquisition, perhaps because they also owned and promoted Microsoft Access, a direct competitor to dBASE. Certainly, the PC database market became a great deal less competitive as a result of their deal to buy FoxPro.
When Borland eventually sold its Quattro Pro
Quattro Pro
Quattro Pro is a spreadsheet program developed by Borland and now sold by Corel, most often as part of Corel's WordPerfect Office.Historically, Quattro Pro used keyboard commands similar to Lotus 1-2-3. It is commonly said to have been the first program to use tabbed sheets. Actually, Boeing Calc...
and Paradox products to Novell, where they would be joined with Word Perfect in an attempt to match Microsoft Office, Borland was left with InterBase
InterBase
InterBase is a relational database management system currently developed and marketed by Embarcadero Technologies. InterBase is distinguished from other DBMSs by its small footprint, close to zero administration requirements, and multi-generational architecture...
, which Esber had purchased in the late 1980s and had its origins as a derivative of the RDB
RDB
Rdb and RDB can refer to:* Rang de Basanti, a 2006 Hindi-language film starring Aamir Khan, Soha Ali Khan, R. Madhavan, Siddharth Narayan, Sharman Joshi, Kunal Kapoor and Alice Patten...
database work at DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
. Borland's ongoing strategy was to refocus its development tools on the corporate market with client–server applications, so Interbase fitted in as a low-end tool and a good generic SQL database for prototyping. This proved to be the longest lasting and most positive part of the Ashton-Tate acquisition, ironic since it was almost an oversight and little known to Borland until they acquired Ashton-Tate.
Overall, the Ashton-Tate purchase proved to be unsuccessful. Several years later, Philippe Kahn would leave Borland amidst declining financial performance including many years of losses.
Downfall
While Ashton-Tate's downfall can be attributed to several factors, chief among them were:- the over reliance on a single-product line (dBASE),
- the poorly executed release of dBASE IV 1.0, and
- a focus on future products without addressing the needs of the current customers.
- the departure of Wayne Ratliffe.
Any one of these would have been a surmountable problem, but combined they brought about the swift decline of the company.
Ashton-Tate's dependence on dBASE is understandable. It was one of the earliest killer application
Killer application
A killer application , in the jargon of marketing teams, has been used to refer to any computer program that is so necessary or desirable that it proves the core value of some larger technology, such as computer hardware, gaming console, software, or an operating system...
s in the CP/M
CP/M
CP/M was a mass-market operating system created for Intel 8080/85 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc...
world, along with WordStar
WordStar
WordStar is a word processor application, published by MicroPro International, originally written for the CP/M operating system but later ported to DOS, that enjoyed a dominant market share during the early to mid-1980s. Although Seymour I...
and (on other platforms) VisiCalc
VisiCalc
VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program available for personal computers. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool...
, and was able to make the transition to the IBM PC
IBM PC
The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...
to maintain its dominance. Its success alone is what created and sustained the company through the first nine years. However, the over reliance on dBASE for revenue had a catastrophic effect on the company when dBASE IV sales tanked.
In the end, the poor quality and extremely late release of dBASE IV drove existing customers away and kept new ones from accepting it. This loss of revenue for the cash cow
Cash cow
In business, a cash cow is a product or a business unit that generates unusually high profit margins: so high that it is responsible for a large amount of a company's operating profit...
was too much for the company to bear, and combined with management missteps, eventually lead to the sale to the upstart Borland International.
Non dBASE products
Through the mid-80s Esber increasingly looked to diversify the company's holdings, and purchased a number of products to roll into the Ashton-Tate lineup. By and large most of these acquisitions failed and did not result in the revenue expected. This experience is another illustration of the difficulty of integrating acquired companies and products in a rapidly changing technological market.Friday!
Named after Robinson Crusoe's man Friday, chosen because by using the program you could supposedly "get everything done by Friday!," this was a simple PIM program written around 1984, years before that acronym became popular. It was written using a customized version of dBASE II (not dBASE III Plus as previously noted; it predates that product). Several design flaws surfaced in beta-testing that required a major design and code re-write. These changes were made in-house and as a consequence, an ownership dispute arose between the original authors and Ashton-Tate Management. So after a significant advertising campaign, and lack-luster interest, Friday! was canceled. Sort of the Microsoft BobMicrosoft Bob
Microsoft Bob was a Microsoft software product, released in March 1995, which provided a new, nontechnical interface to desktop computing operations. It was one of Microsoft's more visible product failures...
of its day.
Javelin
This was a financial modelling package. "Javelin's ability to handle very complex structures - using facilities such as sharing data between different models. ... It was possible to develop some fairly sophisticated models with 1-2-3 but it was no good for time series". Javelin had a time series based database, linking of historical data to forecasting data, AI and models took up very little space. Philips & Drew liked version 1.1. Source "The Private Investor Spring 1987" Reprint.Framework
Their most successful attempt at a breakout was with FrameworkFramework (office suite)
Framework, launched in 1984, was the first office suite to run on the PC 8086 with DOS operating system. ValDocs, an even earlier integrated suite, actually comparable to the original Macintosh of 1984 and Apple Lisa of 1982 was produced by Epson, a complete integrated work station based on the...
. Framework, like dBASE before it, was the brainchild of a single author, Robert Carr
Robert Carr (Programmer)
Robert Carr is credited as the architect of GO Corporation's PenPoint OS. He was profiled in the book Programmers at Work , where he was credited as the author of Framework....
, who felt that integrated applications offered huge benefits over a selection of separate apps doing the same thing. In 1983 he had a runnable demo of his product, and showed it to Ashton-Tate who immediately signed a deal to support development in exchange for marketing rights.
Framework was an integrated DOS
DOS
DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...
-based office suite that combined a word processor
Word processor
A word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....
, spreadsheet
Spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet. It displays multiple cells usually in a two-dimensional matrix or grid consisting of rows and columns. Each cell contains alphanumeric text, numeric values or formulas...
, mini-database application
Database application
A database application is a computer program whose primary purpose is entering and retrieving information from a computer-managed database. Early examples of database applications were accounting systems and airline reservations systems, such as SABRE, developed starting in 1957.A characteristic of...
, outliner
Outliner
An outliner is a computer program that allows text to be organized into discrete sections that are related in a tree structure or hierarchy. Text may be collapsed into a node, or expanded and edited....
, charting tool, and a terminal program. Later versions also added e-mail support. Framework also had the distinction of being available in over 14 languages. Although DOS based, Framework supported a fully functional GUI
Gui
Gui or guee is a generic term to refer to grilled dishes in Korean cuisine. These most commonly have meat or fish as their primary ingredient, but may in some cases also comprise grilled vegetables or other vegetarian ingredients. The term derives from the verb, "gupda" in Korean, which literally...
based on character graphics (similar to Borland's OWL
Object Windows Library
The Object Windows Library is a Borland C++ object-oriented framework originally designed for WinAPI. It was used in Turbo Pascal for Windows, Borland Pascal and their Borland C++ package. It was a competitor to the Microsoft Foundation Class Library .OWL had incomplete support by the Borland C++...
).
Framework eventually got locked into an industry battle, primarily with Lotus Symphony, and later with Microsoft Works
Microsoft Works
Microsoft Works is an integrated package software that is produced by Microsoft. Works is smaller, less expensive, and has fewer features than Microsoft Office or other major office suites. Its core functionality includes a word processor, a spreadsheet and a database management system...
. The market was never large to begin with, as most customers chose to purchase the large, monolithic versions of applications even if they never used the extra functionality. Borland later sold Framework to Selections & Functions, who continue to sell it today.
MultiMate
MultiMateMultiMate
MultiMate was a word processor developed by Softword Systems Inc. for IBM PC MS-DOS computers in the early 1980s. Wilton H. Jones, a programmer turned entrepreneur MultiMate was a word processor developed by Softword Systems Inc. (later renamed Multimate International) for IBM PC MS-DOS computers...
was a word processor
Word processor
A word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....
package created to copy the basic operation of a Wang
Wang
Wang may refer to:Name:* Wang , one of two surnames with distinct Chinese characters.* Titles in Chinese nobility* A title in Korean nobility* A title in Mongolian nobilityPlaces:* Wang River in Thailand...
dedicated word processor workstation on the PC. In the early 1980s many companies used MultiMate to replace these expensive systems with PCs, MultiMate offering them an easy migration path. Although it wasn't clear at the time, this migration was largely complete by the time Ashton-Tate bought the company in December 1985. Sales had plateaued, although they were still fairly impressive at the time.
What was originally a deliberate attempt to copy the Wang's system now made the product seem hopelessly outdated, and it would require a major upgrade to remain useful. WordPerfect
WordPerfect
WordPerfect is a word processing application, now owned by Corel.Bruce Bastian, a Brigham Young University graduate student, and BYU computer science professor Dr. Alan Ashton joined forces to design a word processing system for the city of Orem's Data General Corp. minicomputer system in 1979...
took advantage of these issues and took market share to a degree essentially lethal for MultiMate.
The Master Series of Products
Ashton-Tate purchased Decision Resources of Westport, CT in 1986. Decision Resources had created the Chart Master, Sign Master, Map Master and Diagram Master programs. These were simple but effective business charting/drawing programs that counted on various spreadsheetSpreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet. It displays multiple cells usually in a two-dimensional matrix or grid consisting of rows and columns. Each cell contains alphanumeric text, numeric values or formulas...
programs being so poor at charting that people would gladly pay for another program to improve on them. By the time Ashton-Tate purchased the company it was clear that newer generations of spreadsheet programs would improve their charting abilities to the point where the Decision Resource products wouldn't really be needed, but the company was also working on a new drawing package that was more interesting in the long run.
After the purchase was completed it became clear that the drawing product was inadequate. Although it was released as Draw Applause it never sold well.
Byline
Byline was an early desktop publishing program developed by the company SkiSoft and distributed and marketed by Ashton-Tate. When it was introduced sometime around 1987, it was both fairly inexpensive and easy to use, and gained a small but devoted following. Users designed a page by filling out an onscreen form that described page characteristics: margins, columns, font and size, and so on. The program created the page and an onscreen preview. This method of working was in contrast to the more directly interactive WYSIWYGWYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...
approach taken by Aldus
Aldus
Aldus Corporation, named after the 15th-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, was the inventor of the groundbreaking PageMaker software, a program that is generally credited with creating the desktop publishing field. The company was founded by Jeremy Jaech, Mark Sundstrom, Mike Templeman,...
PageMaker and Ventura Publisher, which became more popular as windowing systems and GUIs
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
became more common. Also, as time went on more and more so-called desktop publishing features were added to popular word processing software, probably reducing the market for such a low-end desktop publishing program. Oddly, Byline was written in the Forth programming language.
RapidFile
A flat-file database program launched in October 1986 that was commonly used to create mailing labels and form letters on PCs running the DOS operating system. RapidFile was also adept at organizing and manipulating data imported from other software programs. It was designed to be a fast, easy-to-use and less-expensive database for those who did not require the sophisticated capabilities of dBASE. It achieved moderate success for Ashton-Tate, but a version for Microsoft Windows was never developed. RapidFile is unusual in that it was developed in the programming language Forth.The most recent release of Rapidfile was version 1.2 released in 1986, with versions available in several languages including English, French and Dutch. Although Rapidfile was created for the DOS operating system, information is available http://www.rapidfile.co.uk/ to show that it can be persuaded to work reasonably well in the DOS box of Microsoft Windows 95, 98, 2000 and XP, and also under GNU/Linux using the DOSemu http://www.dosemu.org/ emulation software.
Mac products
When Apple was introducing the Macintosh in the early 1980s, Ashton-Tate was one of the "big three" software companies who Apple was desperate to have support their new platform. When approached, Ashton-Tate indicated an interest in becoming a major player in the new market.As early as the winter of 1984, only a few months after the Mac's introduction, the company purchased a small Mac database developer and moved them to their Glendale development center to work on what would later be known as dBASE Mac
DBASE Mac
dBASE Mac was a database management system for the Apple Macintosh, released by Ashton-Tate in 1987. Although the GUI was lauded in the press, the new application was so slow that it became something of a joke in the industry...
. Soon after this, in early 1985, they agreed to fund development of a spreadsheet
Spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet. It displays multiple cells usually in a two-dimensional matrix or grid consisting of rows and columns. Each cell contains alphanumeric text, numeric values or formulas...
program being developed by Randy Wigginton
Randy Wigginton
Randy Wigginton was one of Apple Computer's first employees , creator of MacWrite, Full Impact, and numerous other Mac applications. He used to work in development at eBay, Quigo, Inc and Move.com. In Nov 2010 he left his position as a "Site Reliability Engineer" at Google Inc., purportedly after...
, former project lead of MacWrite
MacWrite
MacWrite was a word processor application released along with the first Apple Macintosh systems in 1984. It was the first such program that was widely available to the public to offer WYSIWYG operation, with multiple fonts and styles...
. Years later they added a "high-end" word processor
Word processor
A word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....
from Ann Arbor Softworks, who were in the midst of a rather public debacle while trying to release FullWrite Professional
FullWrite Professional
FullWrite Professional was a word processor application for the Apple Macintosh, released in late 1988 by Ashton-Tate. Though it was released a year later than promised and had a number of problems, it developed a faithful following and some amount of commercial success...
which was now almost a year late.
Ed Esber and Apple Computer chairman John Sculley
John Sculley
John Sculley is an American businessman. Sculley was vice-president and president of PepsiCo , until he became CEO of Apple on April 8, 1983, a position he held until leaving in 1993...
jointly announced Ashton Tate's family of Mac products in Palo Alto. dBASE Mac finally shipped in September 1987, but it was dBASE in name only. Users were dismayed to learn that in order to interact with their major investment in dBASE on the PC, their applications would have to be re-written from scratch. Adding to their frustration was the fact that it crashed a lot and was extremely slow. Given that the program was really a completely new Mac-only system, it had to compete with other Mac-only database systems like 4th Dimension
4th Dimension (Software)
4th Dimension is a relational database management system and IDE developed by Laurent Ribardière. 4D was created in 1984....
, Helix
Helix database
Helix is a pioneering database management system for the Apple Macintosh platform, created in 1983. Helix uses a graphical "programming language" to add logic to its applications, allowing non-programmers to construct sophisticated applications...
and FileMaker
FileMaker
FileMaker Pro is a cross-platform relational database application from FileMaker Inc., formerly Claris, a subsidiary of Apple Inc. It integrates a database engine with a GUI-based interface, allowing users to modify the database by dragging new elements into layouts, screens, or forms...
.
FullWrite and Full Impact were released in 1988. Both were liked by reviewers and had leading edge features. FullWrite was an outstanding product, while Full Impact had the bad luck of being timed just after a major new release of Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...
and the release of Informix Wingz
Informix Wingz
Wingz was a spreadsheet program sold by Informix in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Originally developed for the Macintosh, it was later distributed on Microsoft Windows, OS/2, NextStep and several other commercial flavors of Unix...
.
All three products were excellent at their core, but were really not viewed as a family and needed to link together more cleanly. They all also needed a solid follow-up release to address some of the bugs and performance issues. However, no major upgrades ever shipped for either FullWrite or dBASE Mac, and the only major upgrade to FullImpact shipped a full two years after release. Releases of Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh , the AT&T Unix PC , Atari ST , SCO UNIX,...
and Excel soon closed some of the feature gaps, and as the Mac OS
Mac OS
Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...
changed the products became increasingly difficult to run. Microsoft embarked on a campaign in earnest to discredit and kill Ashton-Tate's products, at one point exaggerating the system requirements for FullWrite, and going so far as to delete Ashton Tate software from Mac dealers demonstration computers.
FullWrite was later sold off by Borland in 1994 to Akimbo Systems, but by that time Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh , the AT&T Unix PC , Atari ST , SCO UNIX,...
had taken over the entire market and they too eventually gave up on it. dBASE Mac was sold off in 1990 and re-released as nuBASE, but it was no more successful and was gone within a year. Full Impact simply disappeared.
SQL Server
One problem with dBASE and similar products is that it was not based on the client–server model. That means that when a database is used by a number of users on a networkComputer network
A computer network, often simply referred to as a network, is a collection of hardware components and computers interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information....
, the system normally relies on the underlying network software to deliver entire files to the user's desktop machine where the actual query work is carried out. This creates heavy load on the network, as each user "pulls down" the database files, often to do the same query over and over. In contrast, a client–server system receives only small commands from the user's machine, processes the command locally on the server, and the returns only those results the user was looking for. Overall network use is dramatically lowered.
A client–server database is a fundamentally different sort of system than a traditional single-user system like dBASE, and although they share many features in common, it is typically not a simple task to take an existing single-user product and turn it into a true client–server system. As the business world became increasingly networked, Ashton-Tate's system would become irrelevant without updating to the client server era.
Ed Esber and Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...
introduced SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database server, developed by Microsoft: It is a software product whose primary function is to store and retrieve data as requested by other software applications, be it those on the same computer or those running on another computer across a network...
to the world in a joint New York press conference. The basic idea was to use SQL Server as a back-end and dBASE as the front-end, allowing the existing dBASE market to use their forms and programming knowledge on top of a SQL system. SQL Server was actually a product developed by Sybase
Sybase
Sybase, an SAP company, is an enterprise software and services company offering software to manage, analyze, and mobilize information, using relational databases, analytics and data warehousing solutions and mobile applications development platforms....
corporation, which Microsoft had licensed. From a business perspective this had little direct effect on the company, at least in the short term.
dBASE continued to sell well, and the company eventually peaked at $318M in yearly sales. During this period, Esber hired some of the most brilliant database engineers in the industry, including Dr. Moshe Zloof from IBM, Harry Wong, and Mike Benson (who would later head Esber's efforts to rebuild a new dBASE).
Tate Publishing
The Tate Publishing division of Ashton-Tate initially published books about Ashton-Tate's software; in October 1988 it branched out to third-party software. For other companies with the same name, see Tate Publishing.Lawsuits
Esber had earlier threatened a group of dBASE users who were attempting to define a standard dBASE file format. With this standard, anyone could create a dBASE compatible system, something Esber simply wouldn't allow. But as soon as they were issued the cease-and-desist, they simply changed their effort to create a "new" standard known as "xBaseXBase
xBase is the generic term for all programming languages that derive from the original dBASE programming language and database formats. These are sometimes informally known as dBASE "clones"...
".
Esber had previously decided to sue one of the clone companies involved, then known as Fox Software. By the time the case worked its way to court in 1990, Fox Software had released FoxPro
FoxPro
' has two meanings:*Visual FoxPro, an object-oriented programming language and RDBMS, published by Microsoft, for Microsoft Windows*FoxPro 2, a text-based procedural programming language and DBMS, originally published by Fox Software and later by Microsoft, for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, Macintosh,...
and was busy increasing market share. If the court case was successful, Ashton-Tate could stop FoxPro and use the precedent to stop the other clones as well, allowing dBASE to regain a footing and recover from the dBASE IV incident.
These hopes came to an end when the case was thrown out of court. During the initial proceedings it was learned that dBASE's file format and language had been based on a mainframe
Mainframe computer
Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...
product used at JPL, where Ratliff had been working when he first created Vulcan. The credibility of Ratliff was jeopardized by his alternate claims of ownership while at Ashton Tate and then supporting the roots at JPL after he left. All the facts were never sorted out and Ashton-Tate's competitors had a self-interest motivated field day in writing amicus briefs.
When the federal judge reviewed the work of his clerks he overturned his earlier ruling, and decided to hear the case on whether or not Ashton-Tate owned the language. Unfortunately, his earlier ruling had already done considerable damage. Eventually, as part of the merger with Borland, the U.S. Justice Department required Borland to not assert copyright claims in menu commands and the command language of dBASE.
Trivia
Hal Pawluk wrote a "personal letter from a founder" in the first dBASE manual, and signed it Joe Ashton (who did not exist). Soon callers to Ashton-Tate tech support trying to get better service sometimes claimed they were personal friends of Joe Ashton. Later, for a time, a large parrot named Ashton was kept in a cage in the company's lunch area in order to easily answer where the name came from.Various articles describe the original mail-order company as being named Discount Software, while others call it Software Plus. (Both are correct, as they were different companies. Discount Software sold directly to consumers, while Software Plus was a distributor to VAR's and other resellers. George Tate also had a third company at the time he started Ashton-Tate, a small retail store chain called Softwaire Centre. That name would linger on for many years after the stores were no longer connected to George Tate and/or Ashton-Tate.)
Los Angeles advertising consultant Hal Pawluk named their first product dBASE II, as if it were a new and improved version. Hal also created a famous and controversial early dBASE magazine ad that read in part: "We all know that bilge pumps suck. And by now, we've found out -- the hard way -- that a lot of software seems to work the same way." After the initial release of the advertisement, Ashton-Tate received a letter from the manufacturer of the bilge pump pictured in the ad. George Tate wrote back to the manufacturer, offering to print a retraction that said their pump did NOT suck. No further correspondence from the pump manufacturer was ever received.
The accurate Ed Esber quote to Wayne Ratliff is: "Everyone in Ashton Tate is important including the person who doesn't damage or drop our products while loading the boxes onto the truck to ship to our customers."
George Tate and a number of early Ashton-Tate employees were Scientologists.
Tom Rettig
Tommy Rettig
Thomas Noel "Tommy" Rettig was an American child actor,computer software engineer, and author. Rettig is best remembered for portraying the character "Jeff Miller" in the first three seasons of CBS's Lassie television series, from 1954–1957, later seen in syndicated re-runs as Jeff's Collie...
, known for his work on the Lassie
Lassie (1954 TV series)
Lassie is an American television series that follows the adventures of a female Rough Collie named Lassie and her companions, human and animal. The show was the creation of producer Robert Maxwell and animal trainer Rudd Weatherwax and was televised from September 12, 1954, to March 24, 1973...
TV series, worked in the tech support department at Ashton-Tate.
The author Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams
Douglas Noel Adams was an English writer and dramatist. He is best known as the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which started life in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing into a "trilogy" of five books that sold over 15 million copies in his lifetime, a television...
was a keen user of Fullwrite and complained about the marketing of the product to Ashton-Tate's UK Managing Director Paul Sloane
Paul Sloane
Paul Sloane is an author and public speaker on lateral thinking and innovation. He was born in 1950 in Johnstone, Scotland and was educated at St Joseph's College, Blackpool and Trinity Hall, Cambridge where he read Engineering. He is the leading author of books of lateral thinking puzzles, many...
who is now an author of books on lateral thinking puzzles and leadership.
In the early years of microcomputer software, any database product (such as dBASE II) that could link together two or more data files was often advertised to be "relational", even though by that time the term "relational database" had been given a much more rigorous definition in the academic world.
An early version of dBASE II included a license agreement that said the buyer had the right to use the software for 99 years. This was later cited by long-time PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak in a collection of software license oddities.
dBASE and InterBase continue to be developed and sold separately. dBASE Plus is available through dataBased Intelligence, Inc. InterBase continues to be improved and sold by CodeGear. An open source variant of this database named Firebird
Firebird (database server)
Firebird is an open source SQL relational database management system that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix. The database forked from Borland's open source edition of InterBase in 2000, but since Firebird 1.5 the code has been largely rewritten ....
also exists.
At one point in the late 1980s, the then president of Ashton-Tate (Esber was CEO) proclaimed that every product would need to bring in at least 10% of the company's revenue or be dropped. This statement had the immediate effect of limiting the company to 10 products or fewer. Further, with dBASE bringing in about 70% of the revenue, the other product managers quickly convinced the president to drop the requirement.
Products
- dBASEDBASEdBase II was the first widely used database management system for microcomputers. It was originally published by Ashton-Tate for CP/M, and later on ported to the Apple II and IBM PC under DOS...
- FrameworkFramework (office suite)Framework, launched in 1984, was the first office suite to run on the PC 8086 with DOS operating system. ValDocs, an even earlier integrated suite, actually comparable to the original Macintosh of 1984 and Apple Lisa of 1982 was produced by Epson, a complete integrated work station based on the...
– integrated word processorWord processorA word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....
, outlinerOutlinerAn outliner is a computer program that allows text to be organized into discrete sections that are related in a tree structure or hierarchy. Text may be collapsed into a node, or expanded and edited....
and spreadsheetSpreadsheetA spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet. It displays multiple cells usually in a two-dimensional matrix or grid consisting of rows and columns. Each cell contains alphanumeric text, numeric values or formulas...
application. - InterBaseInterBaseInterBase is a relational database management system currently developed and marketed by Embarcadero Technologies. InterBase is distinguished from other DBMSs by its small footprint, close to zero administration requirements, and multi-generational architecture...
– purchased from Groton Database Systems - MultiMateMultiMateMultiMate was a word processor developed by Softword Systems Inc. for IBM PC MS-DOS computers in the early 1980s. Wilton H. Jones, a programmer turned entrepreneur MultiMate was a word processor developed by Softword Systems Inc. (later renamed Multimate International) for IBM PC MS-DOS computers...
– DOS-based word processorWord processorA word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material.... - RapidFile – databaseDatabaseA database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
application written in MMSForth http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/ftp.dei.isep.ipp.pt/pub/forth/various/rapidfile.txt.