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By Ina Fried, 26 June 2008 16:14

COMMENT

On his search enthusiasmÂ…
Yeah, that doesn't mean I'd necessarily go to their business plan review but I've developed a relationship with them where brainstorming and thinking about what things we'd pick and how we do it.

You know, it's another good example of something that breakthrough work is not - doesn't happen in a day; it happens in many years. Now, many of those years fortunately are the years we've already put into it, but to really help that keep on track, and just to give them the positive feedback as they're going through it, that group, that's actually the only one that's truly concrete at this point where literally we've scheduled out a bit this summer and even some into the [autumn] when and how I'm going to look at various aspects of their work.

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We weren't that well-known publicly until sometime in the 1980s, and one of my favourite articles was where they wrote that there were four software companies, and none of them was that much different than the others. But we knew at that time that the other three just weren't long term, hiring the right people, thinking globally.

On the mad scramble to stand out in the early daysÂ…
Well, we weren't that well-known publicly until sometime in the 1980s, and one of my favourite articles was where they wrote that there were four software companies, and none of them was that much different than the others. But we knew at that time that the other three just weren't long term, hiring the right people, thinking globally.

It was ourselves, Ashton Tate, WordPerfect, and, I guess, Lotus. There were many software companies that were bigger than us. VisiCorp was bigger than us at a point in time. MicroPro [publisher of WordStar] was bigger than us at a point in time. And then each of those three - WordPerfect, Lotus and Ashton Tate - were bigger than us at a time.

But the way we were going about it and just thinking about software and how was the chip going to change and how did the pieces come together, and how did you do business in Europe and stuff, we were just different, we were just a long-term company.

So, it was funny to me that the article was written right as if somebody had really looked carefully, they would see that we were quite different than those others. And then it was only about four years later that there was a spoof article in InfoWorld where they said Microsoft announced today that Ashton Tate never existed, which is kind of an over-the-top thing. But that was a period where we came to the fore.

There's a lot of interesting twists and turns. There was actually a point where we talked with Lotus about getting together with them but it wasn't a good cultural fit there. It was actually [Lotus CEO Jim] Manzi who - I mean, it wouldn't necessarily have happened - but it was Manzi who ended the discussions.

There was one day that was rather funny. IBM didn't invite us to the introduction of the PC. We'd been invited, and then they decided not to invite us. Well, we had been working night and day. I had told people, yeah, we had this invitation that said, yeah, we're going to go, there's going to be a big deal, and then they decided, nah, we don't want you to come to the thing. That was a little bit of a downer. Now, who cares?

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