What Happened to Borland?

This might provide some hints (or not): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg#At_Microsoft

"In 1996, Hejlsberg left Borland and joined Microsoft. One of his first achievements was the J++ programming language and the Windows Foundation Classes; he also became a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and Technical Fellow. Since 2000, he has been the lead architect of the team developing the C# language. In 2012 Hejlsberg announced a new Microsoft project, TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript."

I can only speculate that lots of skilled Borland developers followed Hejlsberg and participated in creation of C# and later TypeScript.

Several things happened at the same time:

1. At peak popularity, Borland products where easily available. Borland decided to turn to enterprise and raised the price considerably, so individuals and small companies started looking elsewhere. By the time they realised the mistake it was too late. In my opinion this was the biggest mistake.

2. Internet and Linux came, and with them Perl, PHP, Python and others. Borland missed the boat, and again by the time they realised that, it was too late.

3. Sun came with Java and Microsoft with C#, both seen as the future of enterprise, and available for free or at very low cost. Java was extremely popular at education sector, pushing out Pascal and other competitors. Both made Object Pascal obsolete.

So bad decisions and being late to the party. Also it was hard to compete with Microsoft in the long term.

As an unrelated sidenote, at the time when world was turning towards agile, they were building and marketing software for managing waterfall project management. That just shows how disconnected from reality of their customers they were.

Death by bean counting and enterprise bs, that's what happened.

I spent 13 years writing Object Pascal in Delphi full time, starting from Delphi 4 and ending right about where Embarcadero entered the scene.

They seriously dropped the ball by focusing on ticking enterprise boxes and charging insane amounts for it rather than evolving and fixing stuff.

I was in the Borland Languages division as a test manager and staff metrics engineer until I was recruited away at the start of 1995. At that time we were beginning to struggle to compete with Microsoft.

We had been winning for a long time because we were close-knit and highly motivated. We were scrappy competitors. The first real blow is that we moved into a new office complex that literally forced the team to sit separately instead on close to each other. That was a big hit on morale and productivity.

Then Microsoft seemed to get its shit together and spend a lot of money on R&D. A lot more than they could have been getting in as revenue. Just after I left this forced Borland into an unsustainable cadence of delivery. Soon afterward Microsoft just started wildly hiring our best people.

The thing is, for the period I worked at Borland, I instigated or participated in many of the innovations in process and testing that even today are coming as a surprise to people I teach… We had a fantastic team! Jothy Rosenberg, for instance, whom you can find on LinkedIn as founder of his Nth successful company, was my counterpart in development. He’s probably the most gifted technical leader I have encountered in my whole career.

I can think of several things that may have contributed. In no particular order.

* Their application business lost out to Microsoft many times over the years. (Sidekick, Quattro, Sprint, etc.)

* The availability of free and open source development tools went way up. (This undermined the ability to make money selling development tools, even as they become more expensive to develop.)

* They lost Anders Hejlsberg to Microsoft. (His Microsoft resume is a testimonial to his skills, technical and otherwise, but prior to that he was the driving force for the Turbo Pascal line through Delphi. They did diversify, but Turbo Pascal really was Borland's core asset.)

* Developer mindshare pivoted away from client apps to web apps.

I specifically recall Microsoft engineering in the 1990 era, driving up to Borland headquarters in Scotts Valley en masse in expensive cars, and inviting engineers out for lunch "on them". It was a calculated PR and intimidation move by someone at Microsoft to acquire talent and to destroy Borland. Borland and its quirky leader were well regarded in Silicon Valley by many engineers, while Microsoft was busy making a reputation as scorched-earth competitors. It seemed that it was not enough to win a market segment for Microsoft, there was a clear signal of destroying competing companies, and Borland was one of them at the top of the list, based on this event.

Back in the late 80's or so, Borland did a lot of direct mail advertising that would start out with "Dear Friend XXXX", where XXXX was the target's name. I was in Phillipe Kahn's office once talking with him, and noticed that tacked on the wall was one of those letters. Across it was written in heavy red ink:

"Dear Phillipe, I am not your fucking friend. Got it, Phil baby?"

How could you not like a man who'd stick that on his office wall?

I still use Delphi (it is being actively developed) for my Windows Desktop products and Lazarus (Delphi's opensource clone) for Windows / Linux desktop clients.

I do not think anything comes close to the practical feature set, ease of use, power and long term stability for GUI creation. Well QT does but at what expense.

Meanwhile HTML/javascript based frontends is a pitiful clusterfuck comparatively. Modern computers have more than enough power to have the HTML/javascript front end with the power of Delphi. Why oh why web tool creators have to come up with abominations like React instead. The end result is that in case of Delphi the tool works for you. In case of popular web GUI frameworks it is the other way around.

The answer is well-documented in Merrill R. Chapman’s book “In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters”

Terrible title but great book.

Basically Microsoft dominated every software category by waiting for the #1 company to make a dumb mistake. They then swooped in and won.

This book is an excellent but biased history of that era.

After Anders' departure, they created a promising project to make Delphi for Linux that was making progress.

At the time Borland had sued Microsoft for some big IP feud.

Then suddenly an arrangement was made. Delphi for Linux was rushed, released unfinished and flopped. Borland got $30M and access to every .NET documentation. But Delphi.NET was never very popular because it was never as good as VS.NET.

.NET modules were added to Windows native Delphi and slowed down the IDE.

IDE price skyrocketed, users flew and after some acquisitions dance, Delphi is owned by IDERA... not sure how it's doing now because they closed developers' forums years ago.

Borland fell for Microsoft's OS/2 fiasco, and devoted a lot of energy to porting products there, to no economic benefit.

At that time I was using Borland C++ and the quality really went downhill. Errors that never should have gotten past QA. Either they weren't checking or were intentionally shipping with killer bugs.

One release the license said you couldn't use it to make a long list of products that would compete against Borland, like spreadsheets or databases. They rolled back that provision a little later.

Then releases every couple of months.

I just gave up them, they had burned the tremendous good will originally generated by Turbo Pascal, which, it should be mentioned, was created originally by Anders Hejlsberg.

This story is mid-80s, not later on. I was at Analytica, which made Reflex. It debuted in 1985 and sank, to good notices and dismal sales.

Borland bought the company for less than the VCs had invested, cut the price to $99, advertised it, sold it by mail order, and made it a hit for a couple years.

Several of the key execs at Analytica went to Borland and then to Microsoft; some of them are fairly famous now. I don't know anything about the limos or the lawsuits.

I heard Kahn talk in early 1985, and the Analytica founders made fun of him, for selling his product through mail order when everyone knew you had to go through BusinessLand and ComputerLand.

I started software dev in the mid-2010s, and had never heard of Borland, until I heard a former colleague mention it having great built-in debugging tools and that they missed it.

Same colleague had some vocal criticism of `gdb` as a debugging tool, and the state of Linux-based debugging tools as a whole, with claims that "Borland's were much better, and Visual Studio (not VS Code) being one of the few development environments with a quality debugger".

I'm not sure how fair that assessment is, I've found `gdb` to be a helpful tool, though I've never used Visual Studio.

"Apparently, JBuiler used to be their #1 cash cow. Well, until Eclipse came along: within 18 months, JBuilder license sales dropped to essentially zero." quoting from a previous employee.

For me, the only thing I truly remember about Borland is Philippe Kahn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Kahn). Kahn is a giant: supreme intelligence, accomplished musician, worldwide competitive sailor. He is also a big and tall man. He is also the person who sent the first photo via a telephone. I first met him in 95 when I invited him to speak at a Wharton meeting. His vision of the internet blew me away. Shortly after meeting with him I quit my job to start one of the dotcom companies. Like a lot of companies ran by Founders, Borland had a face, for me it was Kahn.

Man, this reminds me of how much I loved Borland's OWL in school. When I entered the workforce, I was forced to use MFC and I was probably the worst kind of coworker to be around at that time.

They threw amateur scene overboard and changed the price from $100 to $3000 per seat. People moved to cheaper options. When companies needed new people they couldn't find anyone with Delphi experience so they were forced to switch. Now nobody uses Delphi and it is impossible to find people who knows it.

I don't know what happened to Borland.

In 1982ish in Germany I was programming my Apple II in Applesoft Basic and UCSD Pascal. UCSD was 3 floppies, I had a 2 floppy system so for certain steps one had to physically swap floppies.

I attended an Apple User Group In Frankfurt and somebody demo'ed Turbo Pascal 1.0 on their Apple with the Z80 add-in soft card under CP/M. Everybody was amazed with the speed and integration. I bought a copy on the spot, received it maybe 3 months later as it had to shipped from the US. By that time it was on version 2.0. I had bought the Z-80 card in the meantime and switched all software development to Turbo-Pascal.

I really dont know what happened, but borland c++ 3.1 was the very best IDE I have ever used, no amount of emacs can replace it in my heart.

Delphi was super good as well.

We have only gone backwards since those days..

Microsoft bought their brains: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/borland-sues...

Similarly, I'm trying to find high-quality retrospectives on Pascal vs C. (I'm still trying to understand today if there is good reason [other than Lazarus and GUI programming] to use FreePascal over C or C++.) Any links you know of are welcome!

I used Borland C++ in the late 90s. It had a quirky UI. I remember that many windows would just float around instead of them being docked like Visual C++. I read in a magazine (probably Byte magazine) that there were layoffs at Borland and that a famous engineer got fired and he drove to Seattle to work for Microsoft. Looking at other comments it looks like Borland fell into bad times in late 90s.

Why did Borland fail? (quora.com) - June 13, 2015, 263 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9712267

Borland spent quite a tidy sum buying dBase (Ashton-Tate IIRC), something like half a billion $, back when that was money. This put them under quite a bit of pressure.

Another thing happened around that time, as the memory size and speed and number of desktop computers multiplied. Software broke out of the 640 kb limit, so feature sets went bonkers. This made it extremely challenging to deliver products with a very low price and very low support cost, two pillars of Borland's success. C++ came along, to develop which MS could afford a 9-figure price.

All of this put a lot of pressure on Borland and everyone else. Total profits for the software industry were lower than total profits for Microsoft. Borland and many others could not find a way and ran to the exits.

I'm not sure how much of a factor this was, but Microsoft kept making changes to their Windows header files that broke Borland's tooling.

They never really made the jump to Windows did they?

I know they had Windows IDEs but lets be honest, just like Wordstar, Lotus 123 and a bunch of others they were way too slow to move to Windows in the industry shake up that was Windows 95.

maybe not directly related to the question, this project makes vim look like TurboC, the author mentions, that he has configuration that does so. https://github.com/skywind3000/vim-quickui

As a teenager in the UK I bought an issue of a PC magazine that had a cover CD (remember?) with Borland C++ Builder. That's what got me started with programming.

A while later the same mag gave away a copy of Delphi. That really opened things up. I found it was more accessible and was quickly making all kinds of stupid windows forms apps and sharing them with friends.

So, no insight into what went wrong but the name Borland has very positive associations for me, and it's safe to say their products played a role in the course my life took.

Acquired by Microfocus in 2005. Apparently some of the products live on: https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/borland/overview

I also wonder what Phillipe Kahn is up to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Kahn

Wikipedia has some information about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland#The_1990s:_Rise_and_ch...

Not specific to Borland, but this book makes for entertaining reading: https://www.powells.com/book/in-search-of-stupidity-over-20-...

He does get a few things wrong though, like open source. The best bits focus more on the 80ies.

I believe most of the cream moved away to other companies (e.g. to Microsoft). The company itself was merged into Micro Focus a few years ago.

Borland logo was prominently displayed on a high-profile building in Atlanta until a few years ago. Surprised they lasted so long.

I think competing directly against Microsoft in the 90s was pretty tough, even if you were largely loved by developers

The firebird database engine is open source, but came from Borland Interbase http://mc-computing.com/Databases/Firebird/index.html

I remember going to trade shows (i.e. 'SDWest') back in the day when Borland was big.

The thing I remember most: They had some guy (short, with very long hair) that did demos for them. Live and without a net. He was good, and a good crowd pleaser. I hope he's doing well today.

The ill-conceived idea of rebranding as "Inprise"[1] certainly didn't help.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland#Inprise_Corporation_er...

I used to love working with Borland C++ Builder many moons ago.

> What happened to them?

Microsoft poached dozens of key staff with 7 figure signing bonuses.

Also, ISTR some anticompetitive thing with Windows APIs, but the poaching was decisive.

The same thing that happened to Lotus and WordPerfect: Microsoft drove them out of business.

They flew too close to the sun.

First tool I ever used for converting class diagrams to code. Felt pretty cool!

Turbo Pascal was a beautiful piece of software in the 80s.

Oh gawd, those CDs were everywhere when I was in uni.

On that note what happened to BloodShed DevC++?

They underestimated Richard Stallman