to a head when Guy Kawasaki convinced Apple to option a new advanced database program then known as "Silver Surfer". Ashton-Tate threatened to stop all Mac development, and Apple quickly acquiesced and dropped their option. Kawasaki responded by starting his own company and marketing the product as 4th Dimension. Another delay followed as Ashton-Tate asked for many tweaks and new features to ensure dBASE Mac would compete with this new and very competitive product. By late 1986 the product was starting to gel, about the time the original 2.0 would have shipped. Management decided to market it as dBASE Mac, even though it had nothing in common with its PC counterpart. The developers were worried that customers would not be impressed with getting a product that was called dBASE only to find it didn't even work with the DOS version. In order to provide some commonality the system could use dBASE databases by building an additional external index file, but it still required the users to re-build their application logic and forms in the new system. Release and reviews The product finally shipped in the summer of 1987, just before MacWorld Boston. As the developers had feared, reviewers universally panned the product because it did not interact directly with dBASE on the PC. Don Crabb's review in InfoWorld was succinct, noting that "DBase Mac is not DBase for the Mac". Reviewers also universally noted the slow performance, one going so far to state it was difficult to tell if the program had crashed, which it did a lot, or was simply taking a long time to complete a task. Another pointed out that even the included example programs were uselessly slow, noting "As for the video store application, customers would have time to view the movie and return the tape in the time it took dBASE Mac to update records." A 1.01 version fixing most of the bugs was released in April 1988, but by this time the damage was done and 4th Dimension was garnering critical praise. The company abandoned the idea of using the Mac as a testing ground for all future versions of the system, dooming it to remain an orphan. A year later Ashton-Tate gave up on the product entirely, and decided to instead port their latest PC database, dBASE IV, to the Mac. Third-party development Ashton-Tate sold off the rights for dBASE Mac in June