1992. By early 1992 it became clear that Ashton-Tate was in difficulties on developing Windows versions of their products and so Borland switched plans, instead acquiring the company and anointing their internal project as the official successor. Part of the Ashton-Tate acquisition was the InterBase rdbms and it was decided that Paradox/W should be able to work with InterBase as well as the Paradox engine, and this led to the creation of an IDAPI engine based around InterBase. The acquisition also shifted focus. Paradox had historically competed against dBASE in some markets, and Paradox/W originally was designed to improve the competitive position in the developer-oriented market. After dBASE was acquired, this was no longer desirable, and emphasis shifted toward an ease-of-use market. However the product could not be changed to match the emphasis (this occurred in later releases) at that late stage, making the product somewhat overly complex for the entry level market. Microsoft's first desktop database program, Microsoft Access, did a good job of addressing that same market, and got there first when it debuted at COMDEX November 1992. In response to Borland's acquisition of Ashton-Tate, Microsoft acquired FoxPro and incorporated its Rushmore technology into the Access Jet Engine to significantly improve its performance. Microsoft Access offered many features that were easier for end users and developers to implement, including a more intuitive query interface using Windows links between fields rather than the Paradox text tagging of fields in QBE, and the Access Basic programming language which was more similar to PAL than ObjectPAL. Access and Paradox significantly differed in the way they presented results from queries. Access showed records before a query was completed and without the overhead of creating an output table. Paradox showed the results only after all the records were retrieved and an ANSWER table created. This performance difference was significant for large datasets and negatively impacted Paradox/W. Taking a cue from Borland's low price Quattro Pro spreadsheet debut against Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access debuted with a $99 price. This undercut the traditional DBMS prices of Paradox DOS, Paradox Windows, and dBase of around $799, which negatively impacted Borland more than any other firm. The Borland management team, with its 85% market share of the desktop database market, severely underestimated the threat of Microsoft and Microsoft Access. Still, Paradox/W sold well for a while. Meanwhile, Borland was going through some serious problems caused by the