According to Philippe Kahn, chairman and chief executive of Borland International Inc, everything in the computer industry comes under the category of interesting. It’s his favourite word, and the word he always invokes when showing off one of the facets of Borland’s products that he thinks will give the competition a headache. Among the most impressive items he declared interesting at last week’s London product launches, timed to coincide with the announcement of results for the year to March 31, was the speed of the Sprint word processor, launched in the UK for the first time. To a combined audience of dealers, users and the press, Kahn improvised the loading of a 386 PC with fairly intensive concurrent jobs under the Paradox database manager acquired when Borland took over Ansa last year. Once loaded down with a couple of jobs, he proceeded to issue commands to Sprint, which he referred to as a habit-compatible word processor, and broke most of the laws previously binding document processing. He believes that he is launching Sprint onto a fragmented word processing software market, still dominated by WordStar users, but with no single supplier able to claim more than 25% of US sales. Sprint is fast WordStar lines up in the US marginally ahead of WordPerfect, Displaywrite, Multimate and Word, he said, which was of course interesting. It is also interesting how this very same Sprint product has, in France, captured what he claims to be 30% of the market during the past six months. Kahn, as befits the reputation that goes before him, decided at the last moment that the preliminary results for the year were not worth wasting everybody’s time with, since he’d been talking them through with analysts all day, and that the product he had come to launch, Paradox for OS/2, was less interesting than Sprint, getting its first UK airing – it was also launched earlier in the week in the US.
Sprint is fast, which is of course why he called it Sprint: we benchmarked it against all of the major word processing programs and it was faster on everything. He then proceeded to list a whole list of functions such as saving files, moving from top to bottom of large files, carrying out searches, and finding line numbers, where he says it beats all competition. That is an interesting claim in its own right, but Sprint is also one of the very few word processors that will save to disk automatically in background so you can’t accidentally lose changes you’ve made to a file. Just to make sure everyone believed him, he pulled the plug out of the back of the machine, then restored power, booted the machine and carried on where he left off. He apologised to any uninterruptible power supply companies that this facility might put out of business. It has taken a team of programmers about eight years to make it possible for him to do that, without making the machine grind to a halt, despite the fact that Borland as a company is only five years old. That team has in whole or in part, moved from PerfectWriter, via various text editors and a competitive program called Final Word, and finally on to Sprint. Kahn was one of the 3,500 or so users worldwide that bought that product. And like the advert goes, he liked it so much he bought the development team. It is Kahn’s ability to buy and keep development teams that has fuelled Borland’s growth this year. Last year it offered a disappointing $29m turnover; this year it’s back to 162% growth, and well on the way to the $100m-a-year big league. But the monologue on Sprint didn’t finsh there. Sprint has also made training obsolete, claims Kahn, because whatever your favourite word processor, at the touch of a button, Sprint can give you a user interface that makes you think that you are using the original, with, of course, a number of interesting Borland optional extensions. But if you’ve spent 10 years learning WordStar, Sprint just looks like a very fast WordStar, if that’s all you want from it. There’s no telling how the US courts are going to take a product which boasts that it copies the look and f
eel of not just one, but several pieces of software, having just reiterated their decision that look and feel is copyrightable in software.
Sprint really is a collection of text handling macros, with an editor that means you can change how you activate each function. If you want a Microsoft Word interface, but fancy adding the WordStar cursor controls, no problem. The final points of interest in Sprint are the built-in spelling checker and thesaurus. The spell checking logic is divorced from any natural language, so that you can check French one minute, and English the next. Same for the thesaurus. Just UKP195 French, Spanish, Italian, German, English, American and some Scandinavian languages (totalling 11 in all) are scheduled for Sprint, but although the UK version is available third quarter this year, no other dates were forthcoming. Sprint runs in 256Kb of memory, but the most interesting aspect of all is that Kahn plans to sell it in the UK at a recommended retail price of just UKP195.
Another team that seems to have survived takeover by Kahn is that which developed Paradox, originally at Ansa Software. And Kahn managed something of a coup last week, recruiting the three dimensional spreadsheet skills from Surpass, to add to the team that have built Quattro. One of the frequent criticisms of Quattro is that at the moment it has no 3D facilities, but Kahn boasts: There are several ways of introducing 3D capabilities into your spreadsheet. Do you have to have multiple worksheets loaded into RAM, all at the same time? If you do, the way Lotus is trying to do you start hitting up against the 640Kb limit when you’re running it under MS-DOS. We will come out with a way of addressing the problem which will prove more interesting to the existing MS-DOS user.
Kahn can’t resist the odd jibe at his arch-rival Ashton-Tate Corp. Of dBase IV he says it’s like Cobol, there’s so much existing code that it won’t lie down and die. Someone has got to shoot it. And when asked about the famous Borland propensity to announce vapourware, Is that a year in real time, or is that a year in Borland time?, Kahn riposted well it sure as hell isn’t Ashton-Tate time.
