Who founded Ashton-Tate?
326107#6
In June 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, using 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.
Ashton-Tate
326107#20
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 Development. Under his leadership Ashton-Tate sales grew over 600% from $40M to over $318M.
Ashton-Tate
326107#0
Ashton-Tate (Ashton-Tate Corporation) 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 in the late 1980s and was sold to Borland in September 1991.
Ashton-Tate
326107#4
Vulcan was sold by SCDP Systems. The founders needed to change the name of the software, because Harris Corporation already had an operating system called Vulcan. Hal Pawluk, who worked for their advertising agency, suggested "dBASE", including the CamelCase. He also suggested that 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. Pawluk created the name for the new publishing company by combining George's last name with the fictional Ashton surname, purportedly because it was felt that "Ashton-Tate" sounded better, or was easier to pronounce, than "Lashlee-Tate". In reality, George Edwin Tate did not have a pet parrot named Ashton, until after Hal Pawluk named the company. Because people kept calling the company asking to speak to Mr Ashton, this hidden tidbit of information became a PC industry insider joke.
Ashton-Tate
326107#8
In the winter of 1982, Turner recruited the managing director (David Imberg, now David Inbar) for Ashton-Tate's first subsidiary, Ashton-Tate UK. Turner set a goal for Inbar 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 Inbar accomplished. He subsequently expanded Ashton-Tate's operations across Europe with subsidiaries in Germany and the Netherlands. When Turner brought Inbar to the Culver City, California corporate headquarters of Ashton-Tate to be trained, the offices were so crowded that the only space available for Inbar 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.
Ashton-Tate
326107#48
Friday was a product conceived during the David Cole era at Ashton-Tate. Named after Robinson Crusoe's man Friday, because, by using the program, one could supposedly "get everything done by Friday!", this was a simple personal information manager (PIM) program written around 1983, years before that acronym became popular. It used a customized version of dBASE II, predating the dBASE III product. Several design flaws surfaced in beta-testing that required a major design and rewriting of code. These changes were made in-house by Jim Lewis who soon after joined Ashton-Tate as a lead developer and product manager. After a significant advertising campaign and modest interest, Friday! was eventually withdrawn from the market. (See also, Microsoft Bob.)
Ashton-Tate
326107#36
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 Cullinet, Computer Associates, Informix, Symantec and Microsoft. (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.
Ashton-Tate
209537#19
Ashton-Tate was invited to participate, but instead it saw the rise of xBase as an illegal threat to its proprietary technology. In 1988 Ashton-Tate filed suit against Fox Software and Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) for copying dBase's "structure and sequence" in FoxBase+ (SCO marketed XENIX and UNIX versions of the Fox products). In December 1990, U.S. District judge Terry Hatter, Jr. dismissed Ashton-Tate's lawsuit and invalidated Ashton-Tate's copyrights for not disclosing that dBase had been based, in part, on the public domain JPLDIS. In October 1991, while the case was still under appeal, Borland International acquired Ashton-Tate, and as one of the merger's provisions the U.S. Justice Department required Borland to end the lawsuit against Fox and allow other companies to use the dBase/xBase language without the threat of legal action.
DBase
326107#16
By early 1984 "InfoWorld" estimated that Ashton-Tate was the world's sixth-largest microcomputer-software company. dBASE II reportedly had 70% of the microcomputer-database market, with more than 150,000 copies sold. Ashton-Tate published a catalog listing more than 700 applications written in the language, and more than 30 book, audio, video, and computer tutorials taught dBASE. Other companies produced hundreds of utilities that worked with the database, which Ratliff believed contributed to Ashton-Tate's success; "You might say it's because the software is incomplete. There are 'problems' with dBASE—omissions for other software developers to fill". He noted that "If they weren't with us, they'd be against us", and Cole promised to always notify third parties before announcing a new product or changing dBase's marketing. In May 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.
Ashton-Tate
326107#19
Ashton Tate held a large company wide convention aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California in early August,1984 and presented new product to hundreds of clients and staff. Right after the convention, George Tate suddenly died of a heart attack at the age of 40 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.)
Ashton-Tate