Alan Ashton

Two men owned 49.5 percent each of WordPerfect Corporation and a third owned 1 percent. The third, W. E. "Pete" Peterson, ran the company day to day and was regularly mistaken by the press for its head. Alan Ashton, one of the two halves, was the president and chief executive of record from 1987, and by Wikipedia's account his style was hands-off even when the whole development organization reported to him. It is an odd structure for a company that hit $196 million in revenue with 1,100 employees in 1988 and passed $500 million with 4,000 staff in 1990. It held together for fifteen years.

Ashton's route in was academic. Born in Salt Lake City on May 7, 1942, a grandson of David O. McKay, a former president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he served a two-and-a-half-year mission in central Germany, took a mathematics degree and then a PhD in computer science at the University of Utah, where he also studied music, and joined the BYU faculty. In 1977 he wrote a specification for a console word processor with features that were not standard then: continuous documents rather than pages, function-key shortcuts, modeless editing and an early form of on-screen formatting. Bruce Bastian, his graduate student, built it with him. They incorporated Satellite Software International in September 1979, sold the first version for Data General minicomputers, and put it on the IBM PC in 1982 as version 2.20.

Two rows carry the weight. WordPerfect 4.2 in 1986 was, per Wikipedia, the first program to overtake the original market leader in a major application category on DOS, and by version 5.1 in November 1989 the company held about 60 percent of the word processing market; the 1990 Forbes 400 listing followed from that. Then read the last two rows together. Novell paid $1.4 billion in June 1994, handing Ashton and Bastian almost $700 million each in Novell stock, and got $186 million back from Corel nineteen months later. Ashton, who joined Novell's board in 1994 and resigned in 1996, was in the room for the decline. Corel moved development from Orem to Ottawa by 1998, and the 12-building campus in Orem is the physical remainder. Peterson's memoir of the company is titled Almost Perfect, and Wikipedia adds one clarification people apparently needed: Ashton has no connection to Ashton-Tate, the database company of the same era.

Ashton and his wife Karen bought a farm in Lehi in 1995, the former Fox farm, about 750 acres, less than 20 miles from the old WordPerfect campus in Orem, and started building what became Thanksgiving Point. Farm Country opened first, in 1996; the operation registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 1997; the gardens opened partly in 1997 and fully in 2000, 55 acres with 15 themed areas and about four and a half miles of paths, and the Museum of Ancient Life opened the same year; the Museum of Natural Curiosity followed in May 2014 and the Butterfly Biosphere in 2019. The golf course covers more than 200 acres. Visitor counts have moved with each venue: about 1.5 million a year around 2010, more than 3 million in 2015 by the Daily Herald's count, and roughly 2.8 million a year in the Wikipedia article's current figure, which suggests either a dip or two different ways of counting; Wikipedia's editors have flagged that article for promotional language, so read the numbers as the institution's own. The institution today describes 155 acres, seven venues, 800 employees and 800 volunteers, with a mission statement about hands-on STEM programs for children that reads nothing like a garden brochure. Ashton's own line about the motive, quoted on Wikipedia, is short: "We wanted to create something for the people around us." The Daily Herald reported in 2010 that the couple intended to give away their fortune before they died, and Karen Ashton's version was blunter: "I'm probably not going to have any left by the time I go." Alongside it Ashton set up ASH Capital in April 1999, a venture investment firm he controls and James Savas and David Harkness manage, and co-founded the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival. The couple received the Pioneer in Leadership Award on February 15, 2017, the Daily Herald reported, and Ashton's acceptance ran to one sentence of thanks.

The Church service ran through and after the business years, and it is the fullest part of the record. The FAIR bio, posted in July 2010, listed him as a serving bishop at the time, in a BYU stake according to the Daily Herald; he was 68 and sixteen years past the sale. The mission presidency in Canada and the temple presidency in Provo each took the couple out of Utah County business life for three years.

• Two and a half years as a missionary in central Germany as a young man.
• Elders quorum president several times, member of a bishopric, bishop and stake president, per a 2010 FAIR bio.
• President of the Canada Toronto West Mission, July 2004 to June 2007, with Karen Ashton.
• President of the Provo Utah Temple, 2013 to 2016, with Karen Ashton as matron.

One political item, stated once: on October 28, 2008, the campaign for California's Proposition 8 reported a $1 million donation from Ashton, while Bruce Bastian, his co-founder, gave $1 million to the other side. The two halves of WordPerfect split evenly on that too.

Two men held 49.5 percent each. The one with 1 percent ran the company.