dBASE IV: Decline and fall (1988–1990)
A November 1987 Computerworld survey gave Ashton-Tate a C grade for technology, B for product support, B− for management, B for customer relations, and C for marketing. Customers said that Ashton-Tate was slow to upgrade products, technical support was expensive but good, and the company was responsive to their needs. A Yankee Group analyst said that he was "appalled at the number of people who have left Ashton-Tate", indicating dissatisfaction with Esber's management;[27] Computerworld said the departures "have been likened to mice jumping off a sinking ship".
A recurring point in the survey was Ashton-Tate's lack of new technology while being, one customer said, "essentially a one-product company"; dBASE III Plus was 63% of fiscal 1987 revenue. Although his company consistently reported higher revenue and earnings, Esber said "we are perceived as a technological laggard". dBASE, MultiMate, and Framework were all acquisitions, and not developed by Ashton-Tate. While competitors introduced new and improved products, dBASE had not been updated in 22 months.[28]
dBASE IV 1.0 shipped in October 1988. It received good reviews, but by spring 1989 users discovered many bugs. In August 1989 Esber admitted that it had been shipped too early. It was almost two years before dBASE IV 1.1 finally shipped (in July 1990). During this time many customers took the opportunity to try out the legions of dBASE clones that had appeared recently, notably FoxPro and Clipper.
Sales of dBASE plummeted while FoxPro and (for those willing to move away from dBASE) Borland Paradox, DataEase, and R:Base benefited. Ashton-Tate had about 63% of the overall database market in 1988, and under 50% as of January 1990; by then the company had lost money for two quarters. Quarterly revenue at WordPerfect exceeded Ashton-Tate's, with the former taking the latter's rank as the third-largest PC software company. In August 1989, Ashton-Tate laid off 250 of its 1,700 employees.[29] The Microsoft partnership for a version called the Ashton-Tate/Microsoft SQL Server also came to nothing, as Ashton-Tate's sales channels were not prepared to sell what was then a high-end database. The first version of SQL Server also only ran on IBM OS/2, which also limited its success. A version of dBASE that communicated directly with SQL Server, called dBASE IV Server Edition, was released in 1990, and was reviewed as the best available client for SQL Server (in both Databased Advisor and DBMS magazines), but the product never gained traction and was one of the casualties of the Borland acquisition. Microsoft eventually released Access in this role instead.[30]
