Ability Plus - Marketing History

Marketing History

Xanaro Technologies, in Toronto, Ontario, initially sought to market Ability in 1984. After a business reorganization at the request of the investors, the product was taken over by Migent Inc, Incline Village, Nevada, around 1984/85 and released as Ability 1.2 in 1985.

A new version called Ability Plus was released in 1987 by Migent, that saw the product translated into a French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and other European languages.

Around this time in Europe, Ability 1.2 and Ability Plus 1.0 were widely bundled with the Amstrad 1512 and 1640 personal computers. In 1987 Ability Plus won the Barclays Bank British Micro Computing Award.

Migent Inc had several products, including the first "pocket modem", but fell into financial difficulty for reasons largely unrelated to Ability (for example, see Migent vs Ashton-Tate) and eventually reversed into LANware Inc, Markham, Canada in 1989. Migent (UK) Ltd, based in London, continued for a few more years, eventually closing in 1991.

Later on in 1991, a new company was set up in the UK, Ability Plus Software (UK) Ltd, and it joined forces with LANware, with new funding, to develop and market a new version of Ability Plus (version 2.0) which was released in 1992 and then version 3.0 in 1995.

By this time, the popularity of DOS based programs was in decline and in addition, Ability Plus suffered from the lack of development investment in the period following the launch of version 1.0 (almost no development took place from 1988 to 1991).