Ashton-Tate

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Ashton-Tate (Ashton-Tate Corporation) was a US based software company best known for developing the popular dBASE database application. The company was bought by Borland in September 1991. Except for InterBase, all Ashton-Tate products are now discontinued.

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[edit] The Early Years

What would become Ashton-Tate was originally founded by George Tate and Hal Lashlee as Software Plus, a small mail-order software distributer. In 1980 they received a phone call from a user of a new database program called Vulcan, who suggested they look into selling the product.

The author of Vulcan, Wayne Ratliff, had written the program to help run an office football pool at his "day job" at JPL. Vulcan was modeled on a Univac 1106 program being used at JPL, JPL/DIS, written by fellow programmer Jeb Long. After getting Vulcan up and running on CP/M, a popular business operating system that dominated the late 1970s computer market, Ratliff advertised it and was overwhelmed with orders. He was so behind in shipping and support that he had stopped advertising it in order to catch up.

Tate and Lashlee offered to take over sales and marketing under a new company, and Ratliff agreed under the condition that the company name be changed. Apparently Lashlee preferred his name not to be used, so the fictitious name Ashton was created, and Ashton-Tate was born. Vulcan turned out to have potential trademark issues, so it was renamed as dBASE II and put on the market at $695 (there was no dBASE I, Ratliff felt it sounded unstable). The company was soon able to hire Ratliff full time, Long joining as well.

Despite being marketed as a relational database, dBASE did not meet the criteria defined by the relational model's inventor, Dr. Edgar F. Codd. Nevertheless, for its time, dBASE was extremely advanced. It was one of the first multi-file products that ran on a microcomputer, and its programming environment allowed it to be used to build custom applications for almost any role. 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. It was one of the earliest killer applications in the CP/M world, along with WordStar and (on other platforms) VisiCalc.

Although Ratliff's version ran on CP/M, Jeb Long ported it to run on the newly-released IBM PC in 1982. An automatic conversion program was used to convert the CP/M Z-80 assembly language code into the C programming language, which resulted in the beginnings of a difficult to maintain legacy codebase that would haunt the company for many years to come. Regardless, with the growing popularity of ever larger hard drives on personal computers, dBASE II turned out to be a huge seller. Within a year sales had climbed into the millions, and they were able to raise an IPO the next year. The company's headquarters moved to a building at 10150 West Jefferson Boulevard in Culver City, and finally to a brand new building near Torrance at 20101 Hamilton Avenue. Development was spread throughout the Los Angeles area, although dBASE work was centered at their Glendale offices in a quirky building on Honolulu Avenue shared with a variety of other professional tenants.

By 1984 Ashton-Tate was taking in $40 million a year in sales, the vast majority of it from dBASE or related utilities. It was one of the "big three" software companies who had weathered the early 1980s shakeout, considered an equal of Microsoft and Lotus Development. George Tate and a number of early Ashton-Tate employees were Scientologists, but this seemed to have no real effect on the fast growing company. By all accounts Tate was an energetic, lively man who worked long hours and greeted every employee on a first name basis.

[edit] Esber Joins

George Tate died of a heart attack at the age of 40 on August 10, 1984. There were persistent rumors his death was cocaine related. David Cole, who had joined Ashton-Tate as a president in February 1982, became CEO briefly, but announced his resignation on October 29, 1984. After Cole left for Ziff-Davis, Ed Esber Jr. became CEO. David Cole hired Ed Esber because he was the marketing expert that launched VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet. Esber built the first distribution channels for personal computer software. VisiCalc is credited for sparking the personal computer revolution and was the first commercially successful personal computer software package.

Under his leadership Ashton Tate eventually became one of the three largest personal computer software companies. During his seven year tenure Ashton Tate had its most prosperous years and a few of its most controversial. Under his leadership Ashton Tate Sales grew over 600% from $40M to over $318M.

Esber's relationship with Wayne Ratliff (author of dBASE) was tumultuous. During one early discussion, Esber was trying to explain how the company was a team, and Ratliff was "no more important than the janitors." Ratliff was not amused. A more major problem was apparently the switch to write newer versions of dBASE in the C programming language, and Ratliff quit several months later. When Ratliff and a group of sales and marketing employees left to start Migent to compete with Ashton Tate, Esber sued Migent for alleged misappropriation of trade secrets. Ratliff would later approach Esber about rejoining Ashton Tate and insisting on reporting directly to him.

[edit] dBASE III

Regardless of Ratliff's departure, the company was in an excellent position, and in the process of introducing the major upgrade to the product, dBASE III. dBASE III was written in the C programming language, making it easier to support and port to other platforms. However 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.

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. 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 started a project under Mike Benson to re-architect dBASE for the new world of client servers. It was to be a complete rewrite, architected as the next generation dBASE. In Ratliffe's absence, Jeb Long, took over as dBASE's main architect.

[edit] 3rd Party Clones

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 vapourware annoucements, 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 compilers, which would take a dBASE project and compile it into a stand-alone runnable program. This not only made the resulting project easy to distribute to end user, 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. 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 3rd 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 paid to market. 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 point he even stood up at a conference and threated to sue anyone who made a dBASE clone, shouting "Make my day!" at an industry conference. 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.

[edit] Other PC 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.

[edit] MultiMate

MultiMate 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 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 the integration of the company into Ashton Tate and took market share.

[edit] ChartMaster

Ashton-Tate purchased ChartMaster in 1986. ChartMaster was a simple but effective business charting program that relied on various spreadsheet programs being so poor at charting that people would gladly pay them 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 ChartMaster 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.

[edit] Framework

Their most successful attempt at a breakout was with Framework. 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 a DOS-based office suite that combined a word processor, spreadsheet, mini-database application and an outliner. Although DOS based, Framework sported a full GUI based on character graphics (similar to Borland's OWL) that was functional if not as pretty as the Mac.

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 "full" versions of applications even if they never used the extra functionality. When Borland eventually purchased Ashton-Tate they sold Framework to Selections & Functions, who continue to sell it today.

[edit] 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. But 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, it was written in the Forth programming language.

[edit] Friday!

Named after Robinson Crusoe's man Friday, this was a simple PIM program introduced around 1984, years before that acronym became popular. It was written using dBASE II, and after a significant advertising campaign to introduce it, was considered a total flop. Sort of the Microsoft Bob! of its day.

[edit] 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. 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 requiredments 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 an enterprising 3rd party, 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.

[edit] SQL Server

One problem with dBASE and similar products is that it was not based on a client-server model. That means that when a database is used by a number of users on a network, 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 MS 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 and Mike Benson (who would later head Esber's efforts to rebuild a new dBASE).

[edit] dBASE IV: Decline and fall

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, support SQL internally as well as interact with SQL Server, and would include a compiler. Under Roy Folk and Bill Stow's disastrous management of the dBASE franchise, dBASE IV was finally introduced in late 1988. Roy Folk was an executive internally known as afflicted by "analysis paralysis" and it was under his stewardship that most of Ashton-Tate's acquisitions failed.

In fact, dBASE IV was both very 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 release into a disaster.

For one, dBASE IV did not include a compiler, although the announcement that it would had already done much to upset the livelihood of the various compiler authors. The release appeared to be both unusable and designed specifically to kill off the 3rd party developers. When the press talked to developers for quotes about the new product, instead of statements like "well, it shows promise, but needs a little work," some heard things like "dBASE IV is a horrible, horrible system, and I'll never use another one of their products."

The full scale of the problem only became obvious as more people attempted to use it, as they upgraded their machines to be able to run the new version. It became clear that dBASE IV was rather adept at everything from giving wrong answers, to crashing, to destroying the entire database.

Neither of these issues would, by themselves, kill the product. It had an extremely large following and excellent name recognition. All that was needed was an update that addressed the problems. But for some reason they simply couldn't do it, and it was almost two years before dBASE IV 1.1 shipped. During this time many customers took this as an opportunity to try out one of the legions of dBASE clones that had appeared recently, notably FoxBase and Clipper, which turned out to have been better all along.

Sales of dBASE plummeted. The company had about 63% of the overall database market in 1988, and only 43% in 1989. The Microsoft partnership also came to nothing as dBASE never worked well in this environment, and Microsoft eventually released Access in this role instead. Access became a major power starting in 1992, and practically all databases have fallen prey to it with the notable exception of Alpha Five and FileMaker.

[edit] 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 "xBase".

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.

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 justice department required Borland to give up the right to claim dBASE as a proprietary language.

[edit] Sale to Borland

Esber had been trying to merge the company for years, including merger discussions with Lotus in 1985 and 1989. A merger with Lotus in 1985 would have created an application powerhouse, one that would probably have been wildly successful and changed the course of Personal Computer Software history. Other merger discussions that Ashton-Tate's strategically inept board rejected or reached an impasse included Cullinet, Computer Associates, Informix, Symantec and Microsoft.

In 1990 he proposed a merger with Borland. During the first discussions, the strategically inept and greedy board backed out and dismissed Esber thinking him crazy to entertain a merger with Borland, and replaced him with Bill Lyons. Bill Lyons had been hired to run the non-dBASE business and heretofore was unsuccessul. Lyons would ship dBASE IV 1.1, a product Esber managed and was virtually ready to go to Beta when let go.

After giving the board a merger package including individual bonuses of $250K and giving the management team repriced options and golden parachutes, the board and Lyons reinitiated discussions with Borland at a substantially reduced price and reduced joint oversight.

Wall Street liked the deal and Borland stock would reach new highs shortly before and after the merger. Some considered the $440 million in stock they paid to be too much.

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 (which it arguably was). The Paradox group was extremely upset whenever Philippe Kahn so much as mentioned dBASE, and an intense turf war broke out within the company.

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 plan, likely a good one, was to produce Paradox/Windows and dBASE/Windows as two "thin wrappers" on top of a common underlying database engine, BDE. However, Kahn also felt that object oriented programming (OO) was the "only way" to write such programs, which faced the problem that few really usable OO systems existed at the time. While Borland worked on writing such tools, Microsoft introduced Access in late '92, and took over almost all of the market. dBASE/Windows was eventually cancelled. Further, in the summer of 1992 Microsoft had 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.

Oddly, Borland later based its database efforts not on dBASE or Paradox, but InterBase, which Esber had purchased in the late 1980s. Although Borland was financially successful, the purchase proved to be a real management disaster. Unfortunately, Philip Kahn just wanted to buy out a competitor and retire dBASE. Ultimately he proved incapable of integrating and managing a $300M company. Several years later, Philip Kahn would leave Borland amidst declining performance

[edit] Notes

An early print advertisement featured a fictional character named Joe Ashton. 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 is considered by many to have had the idea of naming 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: "Those other databases are like bilge pumps. And there's one thing we know about bilge pumps - they all suck"

A possibly more accurate version of the infamous Ed Esber quote cited in the main article is: "Wayne Ratliff is no more important to the success of Ashton-Tate than the guy at the warehouse who loads the boxes onto the truck."

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.

[edit] References

[edit] Products

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