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Kahn was a poor visionary overall. He didn’t have a vision of the web at all. His vision— articulated to us in 93 and 94 was “client/server.” Close, but really

Kahn was a poor visionary overall. He didn’t have a vision of the web at all. His vision— articulated to us in 93 and 94 was “client/server.” Close, but really not the same thing. He drove constant reorgs that followed the pattern of: centralize then decentralize then centralize then decentralize… He bought Ashton Tate, which was a big mistake. I don’t think Kahn was good at leading a big company, and it seemed to me and my friends there at the time that he was floundering.

CRConrad 5y ago
> [Philippe Khan] bought Ashton Tate, which was a big mistake. Was it really? It brought in dBase to make simple desktop (as opposed to client-server) database apps super-easy to develop in Delphi, and IIRC Interbase to make client-server DB apps easy and cheap todeploy (thanks to the license terms of the CS version) too. I always thought had they stuck to that, and not veered into .NET and that whole weird ALM software pivot, they could have done much better. I don't know how much you are at liberty to tell, but if there is anything more you can say about it: Why was the Ashton-Tate acquisition a "big mistake"?