Re: XyQuest's Fate

["Steve Crutchfield" scrutch@xxxxxxxx]

As a XyWriter since Version II, I appreciated re-reading this little
bit of history. I have one brief story to add.

Remember back in the old days of DOS we had the (in)famous Terminate
and Stay Resident programs such as Sidekick? XyWrite, because of the
way it handled the keyboard, was incompatible with many of these,
including mouse drivers. I bought a mouse in 1983, and found it was
incompatible with XyWrite. After a couple calls to bill-RICK-uh (I
always thought it was bill-ERICA), I ended up on the phone with Dave
Erickson. He ended up walking me through a session with Debug to hack
XyWrite so it could respond to mouse input. He also walked me through
a couple of debug sessions so XyWrite would work with my IBM PCjr.
What a great guy!

Could you imagine Bill Gates placing a phone call to help a user deal
with a bug in Windows?

I still have my II+, III, III+, Signature, IV, and XyWin disks and
manuals. I keep them for sentimental reasons, I guess.

Steve Crutchfield

>>>  12/14 6:31 PM >>>
I was at Xyquest during the endgame. Yes, IBM's pullout from its
software partnerships certainly didn't help. Joseph Kahn, writing in
the Globe, compared the event like a giant killing his children when
he rolled over in his sleep. Xyquest and Signature weren't the only
victims.

In addition, IBM had become very much involved in product
specification and review, and that had a delaying effect on our
projected time-to-market. The original XyWrite IV was to be a very
limited update in its interface, with WYSIWYG viewing and editing in
only a few type sizes.

Post-IBM, Xyquest struggled along, eventually losing about half its
staff to layoffs and volutary departures. Work continued on improving
Signature (which was slow and a bit buggy) and gearing up for a
Windows version. By that time, WordPerfect had pioneered its own
menu-based product and (I think) had a Windows version too. (Remember,
Windows was in version 3.0 at this point, and it also was slow and
buggy.)

I heard - maybe wrongly - that The Powers That Were in the company
decided to finance further development with proceeds from current
sales. Because (I assume) cash flow was a problem, nothing was
invested in advertising or promotion. And sales faltered. Our numbers
- employees and dollars - diminished even further. For example, I was
the sole interface designer left from a staff that had at one time
numbered four.

Enter Kenny Frank.

He's an attorney and software buff, and I believe his vision from the
start was to have Xywrite as the text editing component of a series of
vertical-market specialized document assembly products.

There were many problems. Development was in Billerica (say
bill-RICK-uh), Mass., and headquarters was in Baltimore, Maryland.

Some of us found it hard to get along with Kenny. He was kind of a
24/7 kind of guy, and I remember chewing him out for calling me at
home in the evening on a matter that could have waited until morning.
My impression of him was that he was high-energy, high-powered, full
of ideas. Some of his brainstorms could slow our development process
as we tried to accommodate them. My experience with him was that we
sometimes differed on our view of the facts. Others, from what I could
tell, had similar experiences. (I've had a couple of run-ins with him
since, in this forum and privately. I think I can safely say that our
mutual disrespect is just about absolute.)

John Hild, one of the co-founders and (in the eyes of some) the
architect of Xyquest's demise), left. Dave Erickson, the other
co-founder and architect of just about all that was good about
XyWrite, stayed.

We kept losing good people. By the time I left to take a job at
another company, the Billerica staff was down to about half a dozen
people (from 60). Our offices, once half a floor in one of those
3-story brick suburban campuses, shrank to a few rooms. Bills were
going unpaid; there was a rumor that we were behind in our rent.

The Xyquestrians were a tight-knit bunch, and we kept in touch for a
few years afterward. I imagine some of them, still living in the
suburbs north of Boston, are still seeing each other.

I've probably given a far more detailed answer than you anticipated!
I will caution all readers that these are only my views and
perceptions, couched in what I hope is even-handed and neutral terms.

I loved Xyquest, and I had deep respect for Dave Erickson - his
knowledge, decency, likeableness, gentleness. In so many ways, XyWrite
could have been the best word processor on the planet (and in so many
ways, it still is). But the resources were never there. Even at our
strongest, at 60 employees, we were competing against WordPerfect,
which had something like 600 engineers working on their product.

I don't know if Dave ever gets to read this stuff, and we haven't
heard from Kenny in a while. But I think it would be great for other
Xyquestrians to check in with amplifications or corrections.

Tim Baehr