New CEO has chance to change perception of CA

Computerworld - In July 1995, I wrote a column in which I poked a little fun at Charles Wang, the founder of Computer Associates who stepped down as its CEO last month. I subsequently received a letter from one of his hangers-on (a senior vice president, as I recall) who suggested that I had denigrated a "Chinese-American hero." Judging from the way CA never had anything to do with me after that, I've been on the hero's blacklist ever since.
I suppose I can take some consolation in the fact that Wang has been on a few blacklists himself. Certainly I have spoken with CIOs and other IT professionals over the years who refused to do business with CA. Sometimes it was because they saw CA as a price-gouging behemoth. Sometimes they cited CA's propensity to swallow up smaller software firms without providing those firms' users with a product road map and a means of protecting and sustaining the investments they had made in mission-critical software.
Some CIOs have been so averse to doing business with CA that they have incorporated language into software contracts to try to protect themselves in the event that their software vendor is ever acquired by CA. A couple of years ago, Andrew "Flip" Filipowski, who at the time was CEO of software vendor Platinum Technology, told me he had about 200 customers who had stipulated in their contracts that they were to get full refunds if Platinum was ever acquired by CA. In fact, he said, some of those customers got Platinum to agree that they would be paid three times the value of their contracts if there were such an acquisition. The idea was to take care of "customers that truly had a hatred of CA, as opposed to just a mild aversion," Filipowski said at the time. "I think we took a pretty bold move at the corporate level and decided to incorporate language into our charter and into our organization that basically said we wouldn't even listen to a CA offer."
What's really scary about all this is that in the spring of 1999, one short year after Filipowski made those vows with the bravado of a warrior, he meekly surrendered his company to Wang. I did my best to contact him to find out why he buckled, but he managed to evade me.
Regardless, it was the type of thing that has fed the perception of CA as a ruthless conqueror, bent on getting whatever it wants. And for a lot ofusers, that ruthlessness was embodied by Charles Wang, since - until last month - he was the only CEO that CA had in its 24-year history. Now that Sanjay Kumar, CA's longtime No. 2, has taken over, he has the opportunity to change that perception. That, in many users' eyes, would be truly heroic.
DON TENNANT is assistant news editor at Computerworld. Contact him at don_tennant@computerworld.com.

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