July 31, 1988

DAVID AND GOLIATH REDUX? Software giant Ashton-Tate has filed suit against teensy Bravo Technologies in Berkeley, a company so small that founder Richard Ross’ own voice is on the answering machine.
Ashton-Tate filed its suit July 20 in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. The suit is asking for “declaratory relief” against any copyright claims Bravo might make (but hasn’t yet) about A-T regarding A-T’s new Full Impact spreadsheet program. This is the product that was code-named Glass and was finally shipped — after two and a half years in development — last Thursday.

Bravo sells an enhanced spreadsheet called MacCalc. In a letter to Ashton-Tate President and CEO Ed Esber that’s included in the suit, Ross writes that Encore Systems of Campbell (home of star programmer Randy Wiggington, author of MacWrite) had been working on MacCalc’s user interface under a non-disclosure agreement with Bravo before it started working on Glass. He also writes that he believes the user interface co-developed by Encore and Bravo was the basis for Glass.

The letter also says that during the development of MacCalc, Encore entered negotiations with Ashton-Tate and “inappropriately disclosed” what Bravo was doing. Ross wrote he believed this was an “intentional if not malicious interference” with the conduct of Bravo’s business.

(Neither Ross nor Wiggington would comment. A-T counsel Steve Tropp said, “The only thing I can say is we have a temporary resolution of our concerns,” whatever that means.)

Well, I could just go on quoting from this letter forever, because it is soooooo interesting, but what I find even more interesting is the fact that Ashton-Tate has already tried (and failed) to get a temporary restraining order barring Bravo from either talking to press (heaven forfend!) or — and this is really queer — countersuing Ashton-Tate. Why would a great big company like Ashton-Tate be worried about a countersuit from tiny Bravo?

LOOK MA, NO POSTAGE: It’s no secret to anyone who devours the Sunday paper that Pat McGovern, chairman of International Data Group, and his wife Lore Harp are great fans of Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. A recent spread in Image magazine (Lifestyles of the Rich and Democratic) showed them dancing around their Hillsborough mansion singing the praises of the Democrats’ presidential nominee.

So one might suspect that McGovern is only half kidding when he said recently that if Dukakis were elected, he’d lobby the new president to “recognize the educational benefits” of computer publications and allow them to be mailed postage-free. (IDG, along with competitor Ziff-Davis, publishes scads of computer-related publications.)

“Obviously this is just a humorous idea,” said McGovern from IDG’s Massachusetts offices. “The idea does have logical merit, but political processes don’t always follow logic.”

McGovern’s known Dukakis since the 1970s, when Duke I (during his first stint as governor) would give talks at IDG’s trade shows. He helped Duke II’s re-election campaign in 1982, and now does things like spend occasional weekends with the Dukakis family.

The other thing I’d heard about “Pat and the Duke” was that McGovern would lobby for the post of ambassador to Ireland, but McGovern denies it. “I’m really not interested in public service,” he claims.

INVENTIONS R US: It looks like the Macintosh “point-and-click” concept, if that’s what you want to call it, is beginning to pervade other media as well. I got a packet of stuff in the mail from an inventor, Jim Fox of Foxtronics in San Anselmo, who’s devised a point-and-click universal remote device for TVs and other electronic gear.

Called EZ Guide, it will actually let you select what you want to watch from an on-screen version of “TV Guide,” downloaded from the closed-caption feed for the hearing-impaired. The working prototype is a box that hooks up to a personal computer, but eventually Fox hopes to shrink it to the size of a cable unit. One version consists of an LCD tablet, kind of like an electronic Etch-a-Sketch, that uses a pointing device to make selections. Another is a smaller box that uses a joystick to make selections via the TV screen. He hopes to have it work with CD players as well, to flash a list of titles on your TV screen so you can choose a song without actually touching the player.

His vision hooks into the European “teletext” concept — where, he says, there are whole on-screen magazines — some 200 pages long, divided by topic — about TV programming. “The technology is there,” says Fox.

Fox is trying to get funding to get a factory prototype manufactured. He’s already approached CL9, the company that Steve Wozniak’s company that already makes a universal controller. “CL9 was interested, but (Woz) was too busy and couldn’t take on a new project.”

Wozniak said last week he wants to sell CL9 so he can return to “normal” life as a teacher.