Barbarian Conquests
Borland made its first play for big-league status with its 1987 purchase of Ansa and its Paradox database. Now buried in the Corel Office suite, Paradox, first released in 1985, has never received the credit it deserves for its innovative design and breakthrough performance. The product's initial claim to fame was its introduction of query by example (QBE) capabilities to PC relational databases. Instead of typing in long lines of obscure queries, a Paradox user could quickly recall records by simply checking boxes from an onscreen image of the database and then save these visual queries for future use. This capability, combined with powerful form creation and scripting features, made the product a viable competitor to Ashton-Tate's dBASE and the various Xbase clones. The product often, if not always, came in first in reviews and competitive
4 This is not the storied 1983 toga party held by Borland in San Francisco but a more impromptu affair that was the talk of that year's COMDEX.
analyses, and by the 3.0 release Paradox was widely considered to be the "best of breed" in the DBMS desktop market.
Even better from Borland's standpoint was that the product couldn't be easily cloned. The Paradox scripting language manipulated "objects" such as queries, reports, and forms within the Paradox environment and resisted compilation technology. On the other hand, Paradox was accessible enough to allow third parties to develop utilities for and extensions to the product. The combination of power, price, and third-party push helped Paradox begin to make major inroads into a market formerly dominated by Ashton-Tate and the Xbase alternatives. By the time of Borland's takeover of Ashton-Tate in 1991, Paradox owned about one-third of the market for PC desktop databases. Interestingly enough, Borland kept the price of Paradox at $695.00, then the median price for high-end database products. It seemed the software barbarian was willing to ape the ways of civilization when they suited his purposes.
After Ansa and Paradox, Borland purchased the Surpass spreadsheet from Seymour Rubinstein of WordStar fame,5 renamed it "Quattro," and entered the spreadsheet market with barbarian zest. As part of his slash-and-burn tactics, Kahn launched what became known as a competitive upgrade promotion against Lotus, which had lagged in releasing its new 3.0 version of 1-2-3. The competitive upgrade works by offering the user of another product your product at a reduced price in return for the user ostensibly "turning in" her current product—a desirable marketing "twofer" because the upgrade increases your installed base while simultaneously decreasing your competition's. Quattro's pricing was initially less than the $495.00 median for spreadsheets, but as with Paradox, by 1990 it was repriced to match industry standards. The competitive upgrade was kept sharp and at hand in Borland's promotional arsenal, and periodically the company launched one when it spotted an opportunity. Wielded in the hands of barbarians, cutthroat pricing and competitive upgrades were fearsome weapons, but they were ones that more civilized warriors could also employ, as Borland would one day discover.
5 Seymour Rubinstein decided to sell Surpass after determining he didn't have the resources to compete with Lotus and its market-leading 1-2-3 spreadsheet. As you would expect, Rubinstein first offered the product to MicroPro. Leon Williams, the then president of the company, asked my opinion about the purchase. I advised against it, because I thought MicroPro was having enough trouble selling word processors and was in no position to compete with Lotus. Another case of being right for the wrong reason.
In 1991, Borland reached more than $200 million in annual revenue, mainly on the strength of growing Paradox sales. Kahn was now at the height of his ambitions and looking for new conquests. Casting his fierce gaze about, it came to rest on Ashton-Tate, a wounded company that seemed ripe for the picking. Negotiations commenced between the barbarian and his intended prey. Alas, a group of smooth-talking and decadent civilized men seem to have seen the savage coming and talked him into forking over the princely sum of $440 million in Borland stock for the privilege of raising the Borland tribal standard over once mighty Ashton-Tate.
Ashton-Tate upon its purchase proved to be a pretty warty property and by no means worth what Kahn shelled out. (A sum in the neighborhood of $200 million would have been more realistic. Maybe.) The company's "crown jewel," dBASE IV, was an ugly frog that showed no inclination to turn into a prince anytime soon, and the rest of AshtonTate's software portfolio was pretty toad-like as well. Its MultiMate word processor was obsolete, and sales were dying. Ditto for its ChartMaster family of products. There was also an unsellable desktoppublishing program, Byline. Framework was a fine little bit of code, but the brief day of the integrateds was almost over. Ashton-Tate's Mac products weren't bad, but by 1991 it was becoming clear that Windows was going to reduce Macintosh software to a niche market, and Kahn wasn't interested in investing in it. Reduced to its essence, what Borland had bought for its $440 million was a mailing list of dBASE customers and an installed base that was quickly rotting away as developers fled dBASE into the arms of the Xbase alternatives or Borland's own Paradox.
Making matters even more problematic was Microsoft's purchase of Fox Software and its FoxPro product line for $173 million. FoxPro was considered to be the best of the Xbase clones, and many people thought that if Kahn wanted to compete in the dBASE market, this was the product he should have bought. Fox's programs were fast, stable, and state-of-the-art and could have been bought for much less than what Borland paid for Ashton-Tate. Large portions of the dBASE market had already defected to FoxPro, and Borland would need to provide a compelling reason for the migration to stop.
From an employee morale and company-building perspective, the purchase was a fairly savage affair. On the day of the Borland takeover of Ashton-Tate, Kahn, with that unique blend of tact and subtle understanding of the sensibilities of others for which the French are so famous, flew down to Ashton-Tate's Torrance, California, headquarters so he could watch the company logo taken from the building and dumped in the office parking lot the minute the deal was official.6 Borland's internal company briefings on the reorganization made it clear that the Ashton-Tate employees were second-class citizens in the Borland empire. Barbarians, after all, don't pussyfoot around when they swagger into conquered territory.
The conquered population demonstrated their appreciation for the barbarian point of view by performing numerous acts of petty vandalism, destroying customer databases, and leaving the merged firm as rapidly as they could find jobs elsewhere. On the way out, many took time to call key dBASE gurus and influencers to commiserate on how it had all turned out. The whole process ended up rubbing raw nerves even rawer within what was a rapidly shrinking dBASE community.
The purchase of dBASE also unleashed a positioning conflict within Borland similar to the one that had bedeviled MicroPro years ago with its WordStar versus WordStar 2000 battle. There was no natural technical synergy between the two products; they approached the task of creating applications so differently that there was no hope of ever "merging" them into one product. The Paradox development community thus paid no attention to dBASE and continued to focus on its side of things. From an emotional standpoint, Borland personnel had been taught to regard dBASE as the database product from hell. The company had even once started to build a dBASE clone (yes, Turbo Base) but had canceled it because, in the words of Kahn, "dBASE is a dirty language."7
From the Ashton-Tate side of things, many of the surviving employees had little incentive to care about dirty old dBASE and were uncertain about the product's future. A new version, 1.1, released before the takeover, had fixed some of 1.0's many bugs, but dBASE was no longer competitive with the clones and didn't include the long-promised
6 In the interest of fairness, Kahn contacted me after the first edition of In Search of Stupidity was published to claim he was not present when the Ashton-Tate sign came down and in fact never visited the company's headquarters. However, other people present at the time claim he did. I leave it to readers of this book to make up their own minds about the facts of the matter.
7 BYTE magazine, October 1987.
compiler. It seemed clear to many that if you wanted to survive and prosper as an employee at Borland, Paradox marketing and development was the place to be. Complicating matters was the fact that customer and developer interest was turning increasingly toward the release of Windows-based databases.
Borland only made the situation worse with the positioning strategy it finally did hammer out. In this scheme, dBASE was to be the "highend" product, whereas Paradox was repositioned to be the "end-user" database. Borland, however, didn't reprice Paradox to reflect its new end-user status, and the Paradox development community8 never considered throwing away the time it had invested in mastering the product in order to learn a language it had already decided it didn't like. Instead, the community just politely asked Borland when the next version of Paradox would ship, mailed in its wish lists, and continued about its business.
The dBASE community appreciated Borland's nice sentiments but was more interested in action. If Borland was going to hold onto the dBASE market, it would have to initiate a crash program of releasing high-quality, competitive products as quickly as possible. This didn't and wouldn't ever happen during Borland's stewardship of dBASE. Despite public pronouncements to the contrary, it soon became clear that Paradox remained Borland's fair-haired darling. Paradox was assigned the bulk of Borland's advertising and marketing budget for its database products. New releases of Paradox were consistently released earlier and with greater fanfare than new dBASE versions. dBASE would always be treated by Borland as the company's ugly stepchild.
By 1992, the dBASE development community, fearful that the product on which it relied for its livelihood was doomed to become a dead end, was in an irascible mood. Borland found out just how irascible at its 1992 annual developer's conference, when the dBASE attendees began shouting at the dBASE IV 1.5 product manager during a product demo. The 1.5 version would have been a smash hit in 1988,
8 Some of the main social events of the Paradox community were the yearly parties held at the New Jersey home of Paradox guru Alan Zenreich, author of Paradox Programmer's Guide (Scott Foresman Trade, 1990) and a personal friend of mine. These parties were 2-day affairs attended by leading Paradox developers from across the nation and were much anticipated by all attendees. I attended several of these gatherings, and even after the Borland purchase of Ashton-Tate, dBASE was never discussed during the festivities.
but by 1992 it was another me-too product and there was still no compiler. Previous experiences with Ed Esber had taught the developers that the best way to get a company's attention was to throw a miniriot, and though Borland was a much nicer company than Ashton-Tate, people tend to revert to type under stress. Bullhorns had to be brought in to quiet the crowd, and everyone from the dBASE side of things went home in a cranky mood. Upgrade sales of dBASE IV 1.5 were very disappointing, and the migration to Microsoft's FoxPro and the other Xbase products accelerated.
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