Bill French founded Global Technologies Corporation in 1981, a consulting, database applications, and software product development firm. With a strong background in finance and accounting, Bill’s success in small business systems integration was perfect timing for the PC revolution. Building systems based on business requirements provided the background necessary to launch Global Technologies as an intellectual product development firm.
Bill’s work at Global Technologies focused on increased productivity for PC database developers, leading to the creation of dBRIEF, an Emacs editing environment that produced 25 to 50% greater programming productivity. dBRIEF became the industry leader for PC database programming, garnering more than 80% market share before being acquired by Borland International in 1992. While on a quest for better PC-to-PC communications, Bill co-created LapLink, a desktop-to-laptop communications utility. With more than 11 million customers, LapLink has become a staple for mobile computing professionals, and has won awards in its category for the last 14 years. In 1994 Bill created the popular QuickSite web authoring system – the first small business content management system to employ database technology for managing and generating web content. QuickSite won more than seven industry awards in its first year of existence as more than 2 million non-technical business users chose it to launch their first web site initiatives.
In addition to authoring and co-authoring many popular award winning development tools including QuickSite, dBRIEF, Evolve, and LapLink, Bill has lectured at industry events to software developers in more than 16 countries from Canada to Malaysia, and the deepest regions of Africa. As a member of Ashton-Tate’s dBASE Language Advisory Board, and a former writer for DBMS Magazine, Database Advisor, and Lotus Notes Advisor, Bill has created and inspired many unique and productive business solutions.
As Chief Architect, Advanced Collaboration for StarBase Corporation, Bill transformed its successful heritage of software configuration management technologies into e-business life-cycle management products that support XML and advanced e-business systems development. Bill's work at Starbase provided a natural segue into the development of MyST - a platform for building loosely-coupled information systems. As co-founder of MyST Technology Partners, Bill is building a new generation of personal publishing and knowledge management tools based on Web services and XML standards. The first product, MySmartChannels, was released by MyST Technology Partners in March 2003. |
