The Wall Street Journal’s hatchet job on Ashton-Tate Corp last week has provoked a rueful reaction on the part of Floyd Bradley, temporary vicepresident and general manager of the company’s Database Division. Bradley has been vice-president and general manager of Ashton-Tate’s European operations since 1987, and his secondment to the US is an interim measure while the search continues for a permanent Database Division general manager. He says that dismal first quarter results – revenue down $31.8m to $57m, and a net loss of $1m compared to $11.5m profit in the same quarter last year – are not due the incompetence of chief executive officer, Ed Esber, which the Wall Street Journal more or less implies. Bradley believes that Ashton-Tate’s US sales plummeted largely because the company made a conscious decision to depress sales in order to compensate for overselling in the previous 12 months. In other words, salespeople had been allowed to ship trunkloads of software to the distributors in order to get value onto the books and garner commissions. However, the lack of management control that facilitated this behaviour has been compounded by low demand while users wait for the new dBase IV to come out of purdah. But 18 months have elapsed since Esber promised a corrected version of the heavily bugged product, and there is still no definite availability date. Bradley says the delay is regrettable, and with hindsight, probably a mistake.

Unix version

The company has lost a lot of customer loyalty and market share, and it’s unlikely to recapture all that’s gone astray. Nonetheless, Bradley insists that while it would have been more prudent to debug dBase IV within three months, and add extra functionality in stages, the end result will be worth the wait. Memory requirements have been reduced, it’s much quicker, there is integrated disk cacheing, and there are new SQL commands. A Unix version will be shown at Unix Expo West in conjunction with Sun Microsystems, and that will ship within a few months of the MS-DOS version. Yet, dBase IV is now in its sixth beta cycle, and although users are professing to be fairly satisfied, they still insist that it is not ready for shipment. The Wall Street Journal has suggested that dBase IV is merely Band-Aid, and that it won’t reverse Ashton-Tate’s decline. Bradley agrees that it’s no panacea, but he disputes the suggestion that the company’s market share has fallen from 62.5% in 1985 to 43% last year. US revenues have taken a beating, and constitute only 2% more than Europe’s $100m in 1989. But Bradley says that 1989 was exceptional and reflected domestic difficulties the company is now attempting to remedy. The fact remains that Ashton-Tate has reported losses for the past three quarters, and there has obviously been detrimental internal politicking. Ed Esber, as chief executive officer, has presided over the period of decline, and critics say that marketing pizzaz has taken precedence over technological direction. Bradley acknowledges that there’s a vacuum of technical know-how at the highest levels of management, but he believes that middle and lower management have a lot of raw talent, and that what is missing is guidance and decision. –

By Janice McGinn

He refutes the suggestion that Esber is responsible for this situation by clashing with the originator of Ashton-Tate’s dBase product. Although Wayne Ratliff departed Ashton-Tate trailing several acrimonious lawsuits, Bradley is sceptical that the man that developed dBase II with 50,000 lines of code, could have handled dBase IV which has 500,000 lines of code. He feels that in terms of technological need, the company ought to impose a self-discipline and co-ordinate its islands of excellence. There are many that would argue that it is Esber that should realise the values of self-discipline. While he’s been at the helm, Ashton-Tate has not only experienced internecine squabbling, but has made acquisitions that critics say were ill-timed and uninformed. According to the Wall Street Journal, Esber was keen to build a software superma

rket, and embarked on a mad burst of acquisitive spending. In 1985, he paid $22m on Multimate International Corp. Unfortunately, he couldn’t keep key staff, and that was reflected in sales revenue that was less than sparkling for a time, and rivals inevitably capitalised on that. In 1986, the graphics software company, Decision Resources Inc, was acquired for $12.9m. Again critics say that Esber misjudged the company and its product, which was lagging behind competitors. Databases constitute 73% of Ashton-Tate’s revenues, applications represent 24%, and the remaining 3% is a hotch-potch of activities including graphics. Bradley agrees that the graphics company was a bad acquisition made worse by ineffective management. He says that users had to buy four separate products to achieve full functionality, and the Basic programming language is best suited for teenagers, not users of sophisticated graphics applications. Consequently, Ashton-Tate had to start from scratch in developing its recently launched Applause product. Unlike Esber, who says that mistakes were made in integrating the acquisitions, Bradley admits that the company’s relatively early entry into the graphics business served little purpose except to make it late with a decent product. Yet again, an apparently uninformed business decision gave competitors time to develop the leading edge.

Applause

Ashton-Tate believes that Draw Applause is strong enough to recover lost ground, and the company has shipped 50,000 copies to distributors in two months, of which only 10,000 remain in their hands. Nonetheless, four years and $12.9m seems a high price to pay for a successful graphics package. Esber’s shopping list was an extensive one, and he also acquired products to gain entry to the Apple Mac world. However, Bradley says that there have been no significant sales revenues from the Mac marketplace. He attributes this to changing the architecture of dBase so that it became a dBase product for Macintosh, and doesn’t actually read dBase programs. The one that got away is Fox Software Inc. Esber tried to acquire it in 1987, and the company’s growing market share suggests that it would have been a sound buy. The Wall Street Journal quotes David Fox, president of Fox Software, who claims that Ashton-Tate could have had the company for $10m, but chose to haggle into the bargain basement – and top management eventually decided to do without Fox’s technology. Bradley believes that it would have been an interesting acquisition if the company had been near an existing development centre, but he feels that Ashton-Tate’s acquisitions are sufficiently widespread without venturing to the backwaters of Toledo, Ohio. The prognosis for Ashton-Tate seems to be gloomy, but both Bradley and Esber insist that the company can be revived. Whether that revival can take place under the aegis of Ed Esber remains to be seen, and there must be no small number of users and shareholders that are asking the same question.