chuq@plaid.Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) (07/13/88)
Claris strikes again. The latest acquisition is Nashoba Systems of Foster City and Massachusetts, the developers of FileMaker+ (and the new release, FileMaker4). FileMaker4 will become a Claris product, and all of the folks working for Nashoba in Foster City will move to the Claris facilities. One rumor put the purchase price at about $7 million. This gives Claris a real kicker of a database product for it's line. FileMaker+ was generally considered the best of the "low end" database products. The new release adds multi-user capabilities (either by Appletalk, AppleShare, or one of the other networks) as well as having lots of the minor rough edges and feature additions. I've been a user of FM+ for a while, and pretty happy with it. I just received FileMaker4 about a week ago, and I've converted my databases to it. Among other nice features are some improvements in dealing with multi-column mailing labels, the ability to update fields taken from other FM+ files, a new menubar to access scripts from, and a whole bunch of small, but important improvements. The big functionality kicker is the networking, which I haven't played with yet. This looks like a good (if somewhat expensive) acquisition by Claris. The Nashoba folks are good people with a good product, and put those together with Claris's name (and money) and it ought to make FM an even more overpowering product than it currently is. That should make life interested for some of the other folks in the market (especially the upcoming, exceptionally overdue, Microsoft File 2.0 -- four years between updates has to be a new record in the Macintosh world....) -- Chuq Von Rospach chuq@sun.COM Delphi: CHUQ I don't work for no 'Toon!