Microsoft Paid $173 Million For It, Then Switched It Off

In March 1992, Bill Gates announced that Microsoft was buying a small software company from Perrysburg, Ohio. The price was 1.36 million shares of Microsoft stock, worth around $173 million at the time. The company was Fox Software, founded by a mathematics professor who had built the computer science department at Bowling Green State University, and its product was faster than anything else on the market. Microsoft sold that product for the next fifteen years and shipped nine major versions of it. Then in March 2007 it told the community there would be no version ten. By Microsoft's own customer survey, more than half of those customers had been using Fox products for over twelve years. Sixty percent were outside the United States. Eighty percent worked in small companies. Nineteen years later, police departments, state governments and small manufacturers are still running systems built in it, and an entire consulting industry exists in 2026 purely to help companies get off it. In this documentary: David Fulton, the mathematics professor who founded a university computer science department and then wrote a database that outran the industry standard Why FoxBASE won on one argument nobody could dismiss, and what Erik Christensen's Rushmore technology actually did The November 1988 lawsuit where Ashton-Tate tried to prove it owned the dBASE language, and the December 1990 ruling that found it owned nothing How Ashton-Tate went from 63% of the PC database market to 43% in a single year, and why Philippe Kahn called Borland's $439 million purchase of it a big mistake What Bill Gates said about the in-house project codenamed Cirrus on the day he announced the acquisition, and what Cirrus was actually called when it shipped The four words in Microsoft's 2007 announcement, and why the document was signed only "The VFP team" MasFoxPro, the petition built by two Spanish developers that gathered over 2,400 signatures, and the state budget and police software that depended on the answer Jay Roxe, the Microsoft manager who explained the FoxPro decision in 2007 and had written the same kind of letter to the Visual Basic 6 community two years earlier If you enjoy deep dives into the decisions that reshaped modern technology, subscribe to Parts That Changed History. New documentaries on the components, flaws and forgotten choices behind the machines we use every day. Sources: The Seattle Times, "Microsoft To Acquire FOX Software", March 24, 1992 · Microsoft, "A Message to the Community", March 2007 · Ashton-Tate Corp. v. Fox Software, Inc., 760 F. Supp. 831 (C.D. Cal. 1991) · Computerworld on the MasFoxPro petition, April 2007 · Visual Studio Magazine, April 2007 · eWeek on the rise and fall of dBASE · Microsoft Visual FoxPro lifecycle documentation #VisualFoxPro #FoxPro #Microsoft #ProgrammingHistory #DatabaseHistory #SoftwareHistory #TechDocumentary #dBASE #LegacyCode #ComputerHistory #Developers #TechHistory #Borland #AshtonTate #PartsThatChangedHistory