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The Stirling Group

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Revision as of 03:49, 3 May 2015 by Reiknir (talk | contribs)

A company founded by Viresh Bhatia and Rick Harold in Schaumburg, Illinois, USA in 1987 to market an Microsoft Windows based geographic mapping software that actually never saw the light of day. But in an attempt to generate cash the company started to sell some of the programming utilities they had developed for their in-house needs. Their first product was shipped in 1991 in the form of the cross-platform TbxShield, a collection of toolbox controls that were available for both Windows 3 and OS/2 1.x and by using the exact same API, simplified the creation of cross-platform Windows and OS/2 applications.

InstallShield

In the latter half of 1990 when The Stirling Group was attending a Windows systems event they decided to take out an advert advertising their upcoming products, but they had decided on a slightly unusual naming scheme with their products being a part of a group they called "The Shield Series", all of them having names ending in "shield" in the meaning that their products "shielded you from further work" rather than as reference to defence in any way. While some of the products advertised were under development and nearing release such as TbxShield, some of the advertised products however were non-existing and just something that Viresh Bhatia had decided to place in their advert on the advise of his local printer who said that it would look better. To everyone's surprise the only product anyone showed any interest in was the fictional InstallShield, something that Bhatia and Harold had not even defined what would do exactly.

After querying developers at the show what exactly they were looking for in such a product the partners started the development of an application that simplified the installation and de-installation process of software for developers and end users, and in 1992 the company introduced the InstallShield product, initially for OS/2 and a little later for MS Windows. InstallShield became such a hit that they ceased the development of TbxShield and other products shortly thereafter and the company ended up renaming itself InstallShield Corporation in 1993. The company actually kept supplying an OS/2 compatible version of InstallShield until after 2000, but due to the ubiquity of IBM's Feature Installer and later other solutions such as WarpIn it remained off the radar for most OS/2 users and was mainly used by big OS/2 accounts as an internal tool.

During the late 90's the company was doing 400 million USD in sales a year, but things started to slow down when Microsoft introduced a better default installer with the introduction of MS Windows XP, which lead many developers to conclude that the basic installer was good enough and competitiors to release simpler and cheaper products that simply leached onto the Microsoft installer for most functions. The company was sold to Macromedia in 2004, they sold their business division to venture capitalists in 2008, who formed a company called "Acresso Software Corporation" around the operation and in 2009, Acresso changed its name to "Flexera Software" which continues to sell modern versions of InstallShield.

Known products

Links

Personnel

  • Viresh Bhatia
  • Rick Harold