George Fletcher, managing director of Nantucket UK, has responded to Ashton-Tate’s announcement that it is expecting further losses (CI No 1,242), saying that Nantucket’s long term prospects are under threat if Aston-Tate doesn’t get a firm grip on the situation. Fletcher was marketing manager in the UK for Ashton-Tate until 1987, but left because he believed that the company had lost its focus having announced plans to diversify into the minicomputer market despite a total lack of experience in this environment. According to Fletcher the results of Ashton-Tate’s attempts at a diversification policy into the mini and mainframe markets led to the extraordinarily long development timescale for dBase IV. In the end he thinks that panic at the delay forced the company to pre-announce the product, hyping it as a database that would please everyone from end-user to programmer. In its efforts to write what it said it could deliver Ashton-Tate was forced to employ too many people on the project leading to a product that doesn’t feel homogenous. The result was that dBase IV didn’t really please anyone. New users found it bulky to handle, complaining that it took up too much memory; dBase III+ users found that it didn’t use the same interface; while developers found it too slow because Ashton-Tate failed to ship a compiler. Of course, Ashton-Tate’s failure to come up with a product to rival Nantucket’s Clipper compiler, is good news for Nantucket, but leaves Ashton-Tate looking rather inept. Fletcher believes that as the Clipper language has got further away from dBase language it is becoming increasingly difficult to develop a compiler to challenge Clipper. Indeed, he claims that Ashton-Tate sub-contracted the problem out to Apex Software, which couldn’t come up with a compiler either. He thinks that Ashton-Tate’s plans in this direction are on hold at the moment as it spends time and resources developing version 1.1 of dBase IV. Fletcher said the statement by Ashton-Tate that a lot of customers are demanding a version of this product without SQL Server connections was a self-fulfilling prophecy made because it can’t ship such a product despite there being a significant pent-up demand for it from names including Microsoft that are awaiting an easy way to get into SQL products from dBase. At the moment Nantucket is developing products for different operating systems to be launched in 1990 under the name Nantucket Future Technology. Until then, however, Nantucket’s main revenue will be derived from Clipper, so Fletcher hopes that Ashton-Tate will consolidate its business and stop customers drifting away from dBase. Otherwise Nantucket’s dBase programmers are going to have to make the jump from Clipper to Oracle.
