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It makes me sad to announce that Perfect Sync, Inc. will be winding down in the coming months. Sales have slowed to a trickle – a few per year – and it’s no longer worthwhile for me to pay for a Shopify store, so it will be closing next month. My web site (perfectsync.com) will be going dark when the domain expires next year, but I’ll still provide tech support via email and the SQL Tools subforum here.
This seems like an appropriate time to finally tell my story. I think I have earned it.
My friend Bob Zale was a top-notch programmer, but he was a terrible businessman.
I met Bob in the TurboBASIC days, and I was a beta tester for every version of PB. My SQL Tools, Console Tools, and Graphics Tools products sold quite well on the PowerBASIC web site for more than 10 years, but behind the scenes Bob never paid me on time. He kept falling farther and farther behind, but the next version was going to put PowerBASIC, Inc. in the black and I was going to get “every penny”. It would have been counterproductive to suspend sales, so I let it continue.
When PowerBASIC’s past-due balance reached $100,000 I finally put my foot down, and Bob promised to do better, but my one-year deadline passed and the total had risen to $125,000, and I really turned up the heat.
Then Bob died. I’ll always wonder if financial stress contributed to his heart attack.
PB continued to sell my products and the balance grew larger. I worked with Bob’s widow Vivian, trying to keep PowerBASIC going, in hope of eventually getting paid and because of my personal feelings about the PB community. I even paid the vBulletin fees to keep these forums open for two years.
Vivian told me more than once that she couldn’t have done it without me, Gary Beene, and Tom Hanlin. For a while we called ourselves the Three Amigos, and were basically running PowerBASIC. Our goal for quite a while was to finish PB 7/11, and we put in a lot of hours.
So I was surprised when Vivian told me in early 2017 that the Florida statute of limitations had run out on the debt, and that only PowerBASIC’s assets (the compilers) were being transferred to Drake Software. As you can imagine It was a huge blow.
I want to be clear: I’m no longer angry at Vivian. Her husband left her with a terrible situation; she was a grandma with no experience running a software company, and she quite wisely followed her accountant’s advice. It would be silly to be mad at Bob for dying, and I have certainly never blamed Drake.
In the end my only option was to sue my friend’s elderly widow, and I chose not to do that. Turns out that I, too, am a competent programmer but a poor businessman.
It will probably surprise you to learn that I never got paid for any of the SQL Tools Version 3 licenses that PowerBASIC sold. More than a few Console and Graphics Tools, too. The customers weren’t to blame – they paid PowerBASIC for my products in good faith – so I have always supported all of them to the best of my ability, especially my biggest seller, SQL Tools.
So here I am today, closing Perfect Sync and entering retirement with a lot less money than I should have. I’ll be honest... If any of you are feeling charitable, my feelings would not be hurt if you purchased “extra” SQL Tools licenses while the Shopify page is still open. Can’t hurt to ask, right? Or if you just want to shake your head and think me a fool, that’s okay too. By posting this, the story is over and I think I can finally come to peace with the whole damned thing.
-- Eric Pearson
This seems like an appropriate time to finally tell my story. I think I have earned it.
My friend Bob Zale was a top-notch programmer, but he was a terrible businessman.
I met Bob in the TurboBASIC days, and I was a beta tester for every version of PB. My SQL Tools, Console Tools, and Graphics Tools products sold quite well on the PowerBASIC web site for more than 10 years, but behind the scenes Bob never paid me on time. He kept falling farther and farther behind, but the next version was going to put PowerBASIC, Inc. in the black and I was going to get “every penny”. It would have been counterproductive to suspend sales, so I let it continue.
When PowerBASIC’s past-due balance reached $100,000 I finally put my foot down, and Bob promised to do better, but my one-year deadline passed and the total had risen to $125,000, and I really turned up the heat.
Then Bob died. I’ll always wonder if financial stress contributed to his heart attack.
PB continued to sell my products and the balance grew larger. I worked with Bob’s widow Vivian, trying to keep PowerBASIC going, in hope of eventually getting paid and because of my personal feelings about the PB community. I even paid the vBulletin fees to keep these forums open for two years.
Vivian told me more than once that she couldn’t have done it without me, Gary Beene, and Tom Hanlin. For a while we called ourselves the Three Amigos, and were basically running PowerBASIC. Our goal for quite a while was to finish PB 7/11, and we put in a lot of hours.
So I was surprised when Vivian told me in early 2017 that the Florida statute of limitations had run out on the debt, and that only PowerBASIC’s assets (the compilers) were being transferred to Drake Software. As you can imagine It was a huge blow.
I want to be clear: I’m no longer angry at Vivian. Her husband left her with a terrible situation; she was a grandma with no experience running a software company, and she quite wisely followed her accountant’s advice. It would be silly to be mad at Bob for dying, and I have certainly never blamed Drake.
In the end my only option was to sue my friend’s elderly widow, and I chose not to do that. Turns out that I, too, am a competent programmer but a poor businessman.
It will probably surprise you to learn that I never got paid for any of the SQL Tools Version 3 licenses that PowerBASIC sold. More than a few Console and Graphics Tools, too. The customers weren’t to blame – they paid PowerBASIC for my products in good faith – so I have always supported all of them to the best of my ability, especially my biggest seller, SQL Tools.
So here I am today, closing Perfect Sync and entering retirement with a lot less money than I should have. I’ll be honest... If any of you are feeling charitable, my feelings would not be hurt if you purchased “extra” SQL Tools licenses while the Shopify page is still open. Can’t hurt to ask, right? Or if you just want to shake your head and think me a fool, that’s okay too. By posting this, the story is over and I think I can finally come to peace with the whole damned thing.
-- Eric Pearson
It's not just a matter of creating header files... In order to produce a 64-bit DLL the SQL Tools source code would have to be ported to another BASIC.
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