Claris Corp, Mountain View, California, is looking forward to this week’s MacWorld as much as an opportunity to show itself off as one to demonstrate its new or refurbished products (CI No 843). Apple donated five of its existing products, MacDraw, MacProject, MacWrite, MacPaint and AppleWorks as a dowery to Claris, which it spun out as an independent company to overcome the fact that third party software developers felt that oft-times they were competing with Apple rather than adding value to its machines. Since Claris was established as a company in April 1987, we’ve been busy building an organisation that already numbers more than 100 employees, says president Bill Campbell. During that time, we’ve also become operationally independent from Apple, moved into our own 50,000 square foot headquarters in Mountain View, developed a five-year plan for growth, put a development plan in place, completed significant upgrades on most of our formerly Apple-labelled software products and introduced two new products. However it didn’t develop the new SmartForm Designer and SmartForm Manager – turns out these come from Clearview Software Inc, Providence, Rhode Island. In the international market, Claris says it will have English versions of most of its products available in over 40 countries, including the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan and France. French versions of MacPaint 2.0, MacProject II and MacWrite 5.0 are expected to be available this quarter, with Dutch, Swedish, Italian, German and Japanese versions of some products following in the second quarter of 1988. The dowry from Apple means that Claris should have sales of around $35m in its first year, making it far from a minnow in the micro software world. And on Apple’s planned schedule, Claris should become a publicly quoted company this year – the aftershocks of Meltdown Monday permitting.
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