He drove constant reorgs that followed the pattern of: centralize then decentralize then centralize then decentralize… He bought Ashton Tate, which was a big mistake.
I don’t think Kahn was good at leading a big company, and it seemed to me and my friends there at the time that he was floundering.
Was it really? It brought in dBase to make simple desktop (as opposed to client-server) database apps super-easy to develop in Delphi, and IIRC Interbase to make client-server DB apps easy and cheap todeploy (thanks to the license terms of the CS version) too. I always thought had they stuck to that, and not veered into .NET and that whole weird ALM software pivot, they could have done much better.
I don't know how much you are at liberty to tell, but if there is anything more you can say about it: Why was the Ashton-Tate acquisition a "big mistake"?