{"id":2824,"date":"2016-11-17T15:42:55","date_gmt":"2016-11-17T22:42:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/?p=2824"},"modified":"2016-11-21T11:18:32","modified_gmt":"2016-11-21T18:18:32","slug":"happy-30th-birthday-rootsmagic-part-7-death-in-the-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/?p=2824","title":{"rendered":"Happy 30th Birthday, RootsMagic! Part 7: Missed Opportunities and Murky Waters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"RM-30th-Anniversary\"<\/a><\/p>\n

NOTE: This is Part 7 of\u00a0<\/strong>our ongoing series documenting the history of our company. If you’re just joining us, be sure to read Part 1<\/a>, Part 2<\/a>, Part 3<\/a>, Part 4<\/a>, Part 5<\/a>, and Part 6<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

During the first few years that we licensed Family Origins to Parsons Technology, I built up some good friendships and a solid relationship. \u00a0Parsons did a great job of promoting and supporting Family Origins, and I was able to concentrate solely on making it better.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1993 I had the opportunity to visit a local company called Automated Archives, which created CDs with genealogy data on them. \u00a0They talked about acquiring a genealogy program and asked if I thought they could buy Family Origins. \u00a0Since our license with Parsons was exclusive, I told them they would need to talk to Parsons. \u00a0But I pointed out that Parsons was a much bigger company than them, and it would be easier for Parsons to buy Automated Archives than vice versa. \u00a0I was surprised when they asked if I thought Parsons would be interested in doing that.<\/span><\/p>\n

I tried to convince Parsons to buy Automated Archives until I was blue in the face, but it was to no avail. \u00a0They apparently felt like selling genealogy data on CDs wasn\u2019t a money maker. \u00a0After Banner Blue bought Automated Archives the next year and started successfully bundling those same data CDs with Family Tree Maker, some of the Parsons higher ups wondered out loud why nobody had brought this to their attention. \u00a0Needless to say, they were probably lucky that I lived over a thousand miles from their headquarters.<\/span><\/p>\n

1994 brought the first of many mergers and acquisitions. \u00a0Intuit (the makers of Quicken) had just gone public and acquired TurboTax to add to their portfolio, so it was a bit of a surprise when they also acquired Parsons. \u00a0Many Parsons employees thought it was so that Intuit could kill off Parsons\u2019 competing accounting and tax programs. \u00a0But Intuit claimed they were going to allow Parsons to act as a subsidiary and continue to do business as usual. \u00a0Although the marketing of Family Origins was Parsons\u2019 job, I worked hard to try and convince Parsons to add \u201cFrom the makers of Quicken\u201d on the Family Origins ads and packaging, but the closest I could get was \u201cParsons Technology: An Intuit Company\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"ParsonsLogo\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But Intuit was true to their word and not much changed\u2026 until the bombshell on May 29, 1997.<\/span><\/p>\n

I received a call at home from my contact at Parsons. \u00a0She sounded worried and told me that Intuit had just sold Parsons to Broderbund. \u00a0She had no other details, but the one thing we did know is that Broderbund owned Banner Blue, the makers of Family Tree Maker. \u00a0We had just been acquired by our main competitor.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"upload\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The next few years brought a string of acquisitions, each one bringing more uncertainty about the future of Family Origins. \u00a0In 1998, Broderbund was acquired by The Learning Company. \u00a0The next year The Learning Company was acquired by Mattel. \u00a0Yep, Family Origins was now cousins with Barbie and Hot Wheels. \u00a0Every time another company took over, they focused more and more on Family Tree Maker, and less and less on Family Origins.<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, in late 1999, Mattel spun off the genealogy products in a partnership with A&E Television networks and several others to create a new company called Genealogy.com. \u00a0This new company concentrated totally on Family Tree Maker at the exclusion of everything else. \u00a0Not only did they basically ignore Family Origins, they acquired and discontinued numerous competing programs, including Ultimate Family Tree, Family Tree Creator, and others.<\/span><\/p>\n

During this time customers became increasingly worried about the future of Family Origins. \u00a0I even set my company up as a reseller for Genealogy.com, bought my own program from them, and resold it myself on our FormalSoft website. \u00a0I tried to reassure customers that Family Origins wasn\u2019t going to die even though I was uncertain myself, but I had one advantage over the other programs. \u00a0Family Origins was licensed to A&E, but I still held the copyright, which meant they couldn\u2019t kill the program, they could only release it back to me. \u00a0But this cut both ways; it also meant I couldn\u2019t get the program back from them unless they agreed. \u00a0And they had no intention of releasing Family Origins back to me to compete with them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tensions ran tight between me and A&E. \u00a0Their lawyers made it more than clear that even though they weren\u2019t promoting Family Origins, they were not going to release us from our licensing agreement. \u00a0They were planning on just sitting on the program until it died on its own. \u00a0Things got so bad that they even offered to pay me to sign an agreement that I wouldn\u2019t badmouth Family Tree Maker (since, as they claimed, I was an \u201cicon in the genealogy community\u201d). \u00a0I have never badmouthed a competitor publicly (and never will), but I was happy to take their money to agree to do something I would have done anyways.<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, after several years of stress, it became clear that I was never going to be able to get Family Origins back. \u00a0And since my licensing agreement said they were entitled to sell any upgrades I wrote, I had only two options. \u00a0I could either wait for Family Origins to slowly die, or I could buy a new computer, lock up the one with the Family Origins source code, and start writing a new genealogy program completely from scratch (so that it didn\u2019t qualify as an \u201cupgrade\u201d). \u00a0Call it stubbornness, or call it vindictiveness, but I had no intention of going down without a fight.<\/span><\/p>\n

Next: The birth of RootsMagic<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NOTE: This is Part 7 of\u00a0our ongoing series documenting the history of our company. If you’re just joining us, be sure to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6. During the first few years that we licensed Family Origins to Parsons Technology, I built up some good friendships […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[41],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2824"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2824"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2843,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2824\/revisions\/2843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rootsmagic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}