Borland to Take On Mighty Lotus
Borland International has come a long way since French immigrant Philippe Kahn, the company’s founder, introduced Turbo Pascal in 1983 and Sidekick in 1984.
Computer enthusiasts since then have marveled that a programming language as powerful as Turbo Pascal sells for only $99. Some have gone on to sell popular programs written in Turbo Pascal.
Borland followed Turbo Pascal with Turbo Prolog, Turbo Basic and Turbo C. Other publishers, such as Microsoft, joined the competition with their own $100 programming languages so that these days programmers have a wide selection of choices.
Sidekick was another revolutionary product that created an entirely new kind of software--programs that, once started, lie hidden within the computer’s memory until their functions are called for with the tap of a special key or two.
In Sidekick’s case, the special functions include such utility programs as a calculator, an address and phone list and even a way to have your computer dial the telephone.
Kahn, a 34-year-old mathematics instructor-turned-programmer-turned-entrepreneur, wrote about one-third of the programming code of Turbo Pascal. He says the last of his code to get into a commercial product was the phone dialer in Sidekick.
Sidekick and the whole category of so-called terminate-and-stay-resident programs it spawned have their faults. For one thing, Sidekick interferes with the operation of some programs. What’s more, so many useful little utilities are available now that you can quickly fill up your computer’s memory to the point that you can no longer use your major application software such as spreadsheets and databases.
Borland, based in Scotts Valley, Calif., has a cure for those problems coming soon to a computer store near you, Kahn said. Sidekick Plus will take just 64 kilobytes of your precious random access memory (RAM) but give you instant access to more than 500 kilobytes of pop-up utility programs with a little electronic sleight of hand.
Kahn has more on his mind these days than programming languages and utilities, however. He is positioning Borland as a publisher of major application software, too.
Not content to find his company regarded mostly as a serious rival to Microsoft for dominance in programming languages, Kahn recently has begun to think he just might unseat mighty Lotus Development Co. as the leading spreadsheet publisher.
The weapon Kahn is wielding is Quattro, Borland’s new spreadsheet aimed squarely at present users of Lotus 1-2-3 by offering compatibility with Lotus files. In other words, Kahn wants Lotus users to buy Quattro and use it for all their spreadsheets, including those they created with Lotus.
Quattro’s advantages over Lotus include faster recalculation times within the rows and columns of the spreadsheet when numbers are changed and what’s known as presentation-quality color graphics.
Three years in the making, Quattro automatically adjusts itself to whatever computer you run it on. Also, it isn’t copy-protected, so you can transfer it easily from one hard disk to another as you upgrade your system, or in case your old disk crashes. Lotus forces you to go through an installation procedure to define what kind of computer, monitor and printer you have, and it is copy-protected, making it difficult to move the software to a new hard disk.
Other niceties of Quattro include unlimited ability to create automated sequences of commands called “macros.” There is a transcription feature that makes it easy to audit an existing spreadsheet to verify how its numbers were calculated. You can also use the transcription file to re-create the spreadsheet if it is lost or damaged.
Quattro means four in Italian, as in the next number after 1-2-3, Kahn explained. To make the transition from one program to the other as effortless as possible, Quattro can be customized to run like Lotus, or to use other menus and commands of your choosing.
Of course, the most important inducement is the price, which is $195, compared to Lotus’ $495.
Lotus has had its imitators over the years. Some are quite good and cost only about $100, including Paperback Software’s VP Planner. But none has as many features as Quattro, and the other companies haven’t had the cachet of customer good-will enjoyed by Borland.
The other hot new spreadsheet on the market is Microsoft’s Excel, which matches Lotus in price but offers far more features. Microsoft bills Excel as a next-generation spreadsheet, an apt description of its capabilities as well as the computer speed and memory it requires.
Excel, like Quattro, is beautifully displayed, taking full advantage of the new IBM high-resolution color video graphics array standard. And Excel can produce some wonderful charts that change automatically while your computer is connected to a remote data source feeding updated numbers into your spreadsheet.
Quattro can’t equal that, but on the other hand, you can run it on just about any old PC, PC-XT or portable computer you have (IBM compatible, of course). You don’t even need a hard disk, Kahn pointed out.
What makes Kahn think that Borland can take on Lotus? Nothing less than getting orders for more than 70,000 copies of Quattro from dealers and distributors in the program’s first two months on the market, he said. He acknowledges that Borland must sell more copies than Lotus to make the same profit because Quattro is less than half the price.
Borland International, Kahn explained, was thus named because “it sounded like a subsidiary of a multinational corporation. It was designed to give our customers confidence in us.”
Of course, Borland was little more than Kahn’s dream in those days. But now it is big enough to buy up other companies. Last year, Borland bought Ansa for its powerful database program, Paradox, which the company intends to enhance this year into a major contender for the title as most popular of the next generation of database software.
There will also be a word processor, Sprint, due out in February, which can be customized by the user to run the same commands as other word processors. One person could make Sprint look like WordPerfect, and another could configure it to be like WordStar. A good safety feature that everybody else ought to imitate is one that automatically saves the current file whenever the user pauses to think for a few seconds.
And then there is Turbo Pascal. Users have been yelling for a more powerful version of that language for several years, and it finally has been released as Turbo Pascal 4.0.
“It was a real gamble for us not to issue any updates of Turbo Pascal for the last two years,” Kahn said. “But it was necessary so we could devote ourselves to rewriting it.”
The new program doesn’t contain a single line of code from the old. So, with the original Turbo Pascal and Sidekick being replaced, Philippe Kahn the programmer will be history.
But he’s hoping that Philippe Kahn the entrepreneur will make a little history, too.
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