[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What Happened to Borland?
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: What Happened to Borland?
I recall early in my software development career Borland have a
strong hold in the developer tool space (and largely loved by
developers). What happened to them? They were the "JetBrains" of
their day.
Author : tiffanyh
Score : 177 points
Date : 2021-12-10 17:45 UTC (5 hours ago)
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| Wikipedia has some information about it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland#The_1990s:_Rise_and_ch...
| stickac wrote:
| 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.
| spamizbad wrote:
| It's important to understand that in the 90s Microsoft was one
| of the few software companies that took "software talent"
| seriously, and would aggressively poach talent from
| competitors. They offered better pay, better working
| environments (private offices instead of cube farms). Often
| times their competitors wouldn't realize this until it was too
| late.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I can die for a private office :(
| dhosek wrote:
| Hell even a cubicle would be a step up from the last few
| office environments I've had.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Yeah exactly. Now that I work in open space I realize
| that a cubicle is actually not bad.
| grundoon wrote:
| The story I heard (I worked at Borland briefly in 1999):
| Microsoft would send a limo to the Borland HQ to pick up
| engineers for interviews on their lunch breaks. Borland sued,
| Microsoft settled for many millions, but basically instead of
| buying their rival outright (for assimilation into the Borg,
| lol), they just bought the talent. Last I knew Borland had
| changed names at least twice (Inprise, Embarcadero) and still
| existed, in some remnant form.
| subroutine wrote:
| What was the basis of the lawsuit?
| eatonphil wrote:
| > Saying that he "just wants Microsoft to leave us alone,"
| Borland International (BORL) CEO Delbert Yocam today filed
| a lawsuit against Microsoft (MSFT), claiming that the
| software giant is hiring away Borland's key employees to
| put it out of business.
|
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/borland-
| sues...
| Jabbles wrote:
| _" In the past 30 months, Microsoft has hired at least 34
| of Borland's top software architects, engineers, and
| marketing managers", according to a complaint prepared by
| Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. These actions have been
| undertaken "for wrongful purposes: to acquire Borland
| confidential information and to inhibit Borland's
| competitive position," the filing states.
|
| Borland's lawsuit seeks unspecified financial damages and
| an immediate end to Microsoft's unfair practice of
| targeting Borland employees in order to hamper the
| company's ability to compete. The suit claims that
| Microsoft's activities are illegal under California
| Business & Professions Code Section 17200._
|
| https://www.eetimes.com/borland-sues-microsoft-for-unfair-
| co...
| jamespo wrote:
| Amusingly Steve Ballmer got the hump when MS engineers
| started leaving for Google
| nostrademons wrote:
| As did Google when Google engineers started leaving for
| Facebook, and FB when their engineers started leaving for
| Uber/Lyft/AirBnB/Stripe/Coinbase/etc, and so on. It's
| pretty much a revolving door now, where many engineers have
| worked at all these companies and sometimes even come back
| to their home base.
|
| CA's prohibition against non-competes and the DoJ's lawsuit
| against anti-poaching agreements is basically what makes
| Silicon Valley work.
| llampx wrote:
| Not that the giants haven't tried to be a cartel when it
| comes to labor. Including Jobs at Apple.
| romeros wrote:
| Ruthless. Just pure evil to target one specific company like
| that!
| Ansil849 wrote:
| You're acting like the employees were forced into the limos
| at gunpoint. People have free volition. Offering someone a
| better opportunity is not remotely 'evil'.
| Lammy wrote:
| "What's _wrong_ with this country? Can 't a man walk down
| the street without being offered a job!?"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDbvVFffWV4
| tinalumfoil wrote:
| In this case it's more like, "can't a CEO walk down the
| street knowing his employees are safely shielded from
| better work opportunities"
| blagie wrote:
| It's anti-competitive.
|
| There's a difference between hiring talent because you
| want talent, and hiring talent to undermine a smaller
| competitor.
|
| It's an analogous to dumping.
|
| That is evil.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Dumping is basically not enforced, even if it is against
| the law.
|
| Monopolies and cartels are against the law, but not
| enforced.
|
| It is a sad reality of the modern economy, and one of the
| biggest indicators of who actually runs America.
|
| At least in this case workers made money.
|
| If borland was losing money, why didn't the execs
| negotiate a merger if they had so much desirable talent?
|
| Hmmmmm, I bet the execs couldn't negotiate a big enough
| reward for themselves in an acquisition. The limo pickup
| at lunch strikes me as a big middle finger to Borland's
| management.
|
| Of all of Borland's products that I liked, did I like
| them because of the software devs or the management? I
| guess what I want is the borland devs back.
|
| I miss Turbo Pascal, DOS or Windows.
| ozim wrote:
| Is it?
|
| Hooker offering good time is still quite evil.
|
| Praying on the low instincts of people like simply more
| pay (even if a lot) -- more pleasure is considered rather
| evil.
|
| Cam girls praying on low self esteem man.
|
| Isn't it the same? Throwing money at people who will grab
| it because they are thirsty?
|
| We can argue that Borland developers were underpaid and
| Borland was evil - because they were used. Again "Is
| it?".
|
| That is just such complex question that I am not
| proposing an answer...
| gavinray wrote:
| It's not ruthless -- it's business.
|
| If the fault lies on anyone, it's the employees who
| accepted the offers. If they really thought it was "evil",
| they would have denied the offer on moral grounds or in
| loyalty to their employer.
|
| Do you not frequently get offers for more money than you
| are currently making at your employer? I would be a massive
| asshole if I accepted and left a job every time I got one
| of those -- especially in this market!
|
| Since they succeeded in hiring so much of their company
| away, it seems none of them felt particularly attached to
| Borland or their work there, compared to a salary.
|
| The only "evil" in the situation is how easily some (most?)
| people will abandon you the moment they get a better
| opportunity.
|
| I suppose Borland could have matched salaries or tried to
| keep their employees in whatever way (maybe they did, who
| knows?) but at the end of the day either they didn't, or it
| wasn't enough for those engineers.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > It's not ruthless -- it's business.
|
| It's not like these things are mutually exclusive.
| gavinray wrote:
| It's a dick move, and I wouldn't do it, but I am also not
| beholden to a board of investors/shareholders that expect
| to see positive ROE at the end of the day.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| This is part of Microsoft's core culture. Bill Gates
| championed the philosophy of doing anything it takes to
| get ahead, as long as there's some argument that it might
| be legal.
| gavinray wrote:
| And to their credit they've been fantastically
| successful. I enjoy many things in my day-to-day life by
| Microsoft provided "free" of charge.
|
| Take that for what you will.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| So what I left out of my comment are the ethical
| implications of doing whatever you want, as long as
| there's no law against it. Many behaviors are unethical,
| while still (for the time being) legal.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Wait till you hear how they compete for suppliers,
| customers, and regulatory changes. Business is about
| gaining an advantage over a rival. Scoping up rival
| employees is a 2x activity, you get talent and a
| competitor has less.
| romeros wrote:
| You can take a job and leave if they pay you more. That
| is fine. Microsoft isn't really only trying to gain
| talent. They want to drain the life blood out of their
| competition so they can get ahead. That intention is
| _evil_
| thesuitonym wrote:
| >The only "evil" in the situation is how easily some
| (most?) people will abandon you the moment they get a
| better opportunity.
|
| As if your company wouldn't fire you the moment it was
| more lucrative to do so.
| zepto wrote:
| Not really. Borland could have issued attractive stock
| based retention packages to the employees they wanted to
| keep, and forced Microsoft to acquire the company or go
| away.
|
| This was on Borland for not adequately valuing their staff.
| duped wrote:
| Borland was losing over a hundred million in revenue
| while Microsoft was offering seven figure signing
| bonuses. There's no way they could have paid more than
| what MS was, since MS was using their war chest to kill
| the company.
| xchaotic wrote:
| as the op says - they could have issued stock instead of
| real money
| speedgeek wrote:
| "Stock Instead of Real Money" is my new band name. So
| much meaning in just five words :)
| bitwize wrote:
| I call equity "Bison dollars":
| https://youtu.be/Shxiy7l5b_4
|
| It's only worth anything _if_ the world-domination plans
| go off without a hitch.
| duped wrote:
| Equity schmequity, and we don't know what Borland did or
| didn't offer to keep people around. We just know MS
| offered more.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| a million dollar signing bonus? Is there documentation of
| this?
| guessbest wrote:
| I remember hearing rumors that microsoft would pay some
| developers $1 million a year and tell them to just take a
| vacation instead of work at borland.
| llampx wrote:
| Long term this kind of practice is bad for engineers the
| same way Wal-Mart driving other retailers out of town
| with low prices due to their size was bad for small
| businesses and small towns in the 90s and 00s.
| ConcernedCoder wrote:
| how do I upvote a comment more than once?
| WJW wrote:
| Why do you think they only targeted Borland like that?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| MS was trying to pivot away from their 90s platforms, and
| Borland was a potential destination for customers jumping
| ship from stuff like VB.
|
| It was a different time. Even dinosaurs like IBM were
| still competitive in some verticals.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Because the objective of Microsoft's recruitment was not
| just to acquire talent, it was to diminish their leading
| competitor.
| Kye wrote:
| I remember I started getting a bunch of emails from an
| "Embarcadero." I didn't remember subscribing, and the
| unsubscribe didn't work, so I just wrote a filter to skip the
| inbox and send them all to spam. I must have subscribed to
| something from Borland at some point.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| What incredible impact.
| vrodic wrote:
| Still Delphi was better.
|
| - DSL for UI (Forms) - fast native compiler that produced
| self sufficient binaries - great component library and many
| open source libraries - Object Pascal was extended to fit
| perfectly the needs of UI programming
| k__ wrote:
| It was the pinnacle of an era that was gone with the rise
| of the Internet.
| nawgz wrote:
| Building things that have no real-world constraints does
| often result in great beauty. Unfortunately, the web and
| all its ugliness became the dominant platform because it
| enabled no-download no-install information & application
| interaction
| cosmodisk wrote:
| It was probably 20 or so years ago when I played for some
| time with Delphi. It was extraordinary easy to make
| program interfaces. Fast forward to today and we are in
| this clusterfuck, where everyone keeps reinventing the
| wheel and complexities just keep growing.
| edgriebel wrote:
| > where everyone keeps reinventing the wheel and
| complexities just keep growing
|
| Cue XKCD "Standards" comic. People look at an existing
| framework and declare "this is total shit, I can build a
| better, easier to use version!" They then start building
| the better-easier and realize why the old version is so
| hard to use--because it's a difficult fucking problem
| begetting awful complexity + shitty code.
|
| This repeats itself every 18-24 months, giving us the
| current clusterfuck of JavaScript libraries. Lather,
| rinse, repeat for the past 30 years (n.b. XWindows Athena
| -> Xt -> Motif/Lesstif -> ...<aeons pass>... -> Qt ->
| Electron)
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| In the same way that Visual Basic offered simple, drag &
| drop interface builders.
|
| What happened is also changing hardware, UIs that need to
| adapt to changing screen sizes, different needs, theming,
| and many more.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > UIs that need to adapt to changing screen sizes,
| different needs, theming, and many more.
|
| People keep saying that as if that is this new thing that
| wasn't ever heard of before the web or smartphones.
|
| Open any desktop app and _resize it_. Boom, you 've got
| "changing screen sizes".
|
| And yeah, "needs are different, and we need theming is
| this new thing that never existed before the iPhone ".
| nawgz wrote:
| I think forced aspect ratio was very common in the era of
| these oldschool UI toolkits. Additionally, handling
| multiple classes of pixel density and input (touch vs
| mouse) was unheard of.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Everyone seemingly unaware that this still exists and you
| can still do it in Hejlsberg's C#? Drag and drop WPF
| components and program in code-behind? With themes and
| responsive design?
|
| (Big asterisk: mostly Windows-only and has recently lost
| product direction coherency)
| cosmodisk wrote:
| Windows forms are great, whilst WPF is a bit odd,to say
| the least.. Here's an example:
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/get-
| started/cs...
| the_only_law wrote:
| I would almost like WOF is component styling wasn't one
| of the most miserable clusterfucks of XML boilerplate
| I've used.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| WinForms still exists and is fine for the odd quick
| utility. Doing WPF without ever having to drop in the
| XAML is... unlikely to say the least. You're going to end
| up in there are one point, because styles are fucking you
| over or for some other reason (databinding? lol). But
| yes, C# is still keeping the drag & drop alive. So are
| plenty of tools (Lazarus, hell even Android Studio has a
| drag & drop designer).
| nostrademons wrote:
| Also Android Studio, XCode, all the React builder
| websites, etc. Basically every GUI platform + IDE has
| some form of a drag & drop interface builder.
|
| The problem is that outside of the iOS ecosystem, there
| are too many subtle differences in behavior to really
| trust the results. And because a lot of software gets
| worldwide distribution these days, it's economically
| worth it to squeeze that last bit of performance & user
| friendliness out of the framework. So most professional
| programmers learn how to do things programmatically and
| only use the interface builder if they're doing a quick
| internal tool.
| mbreese wrote:
| My biggest problem with the drag and drop builders was
| how it played with version control. The last I used was
| nearly 20 years ago - Windows Visual Studio C++ with MFC.
| Even if the builder produced C++ code, it was hard to
| know exactly where and how the changes were made. CVS
| (and maybe svn?) didn't exactly like tracking those
| changes.
|
| Is that any better now?
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| One thing I really liked about Delphi was its strict
| separation between generated and manually-written code.
| Delphi had a dedicated text file format that represented
| the form built in the GUI builder. So, VC would just pick
| up changes in the form file and save them like anything
| else.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Making resolution-agnostic applications in C# Winforms
| wasn't hard, it was a simple flag to tell the OS how to
| scale the GUI. And if you used the native widgets and set
| tab-indexes you'd be all set for changing sizes, blind
| users, OS re-theming, etc. A good UI framework should
| handle that stuff internally... even a _bad_ one should
| do that (bad, like how winforms set the wrong default
| font).
|
| Imho, the real reason we don't see stuff like this for
| the Web is that the web isn't designed for modularity.
| CSS, Javascript, and HTML IDs are all global.
|
| Programming 101 lesson 1 is "don't use globals" and the
| Web is the perfect object-lesson in why not.
| nawgz wrote:
| > if you used the native widgets and set tab-indexes
| you'd be all set for changing sizes, blind users, OS re-
| theming, etc
|
| > Imho, the real reason we don't see stuff like this for
| the Web
|
| Where are you looking on the web? tab-indexes and
| extending native web components gives you responsiveness
| and accessibility. The browsers provide theming
| capabilities for light and dark mode, and OS level color
| preferences (I use "red" for selected on Mac) easily show
| themselves on CSS `outline` etc
|
| > Globals
|
| No one uses globals on the web. This isn't 2000, or even
| 2013.
| rhengles wrote:
| CSS - Yes. JS - Not since 2015, I'll admit that is
| somewhat recent. HTML IDs - IDs are only good if they're
| unique. Since HTML had no notion of scope, they became
| global. Shadow DOM is the web platform answer for
| modularization, however any JS framework will allow you
| to slice your CSS and HTML in components.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Yeah I feel that in a way, the best time to be a
| developer was back in the 1980s/90s. Your tools were
| limited but those constraints took away a lot of the
| "overhead" thinking about what frameworks to use and you
| could just focus on functionality. You didn't have Google
| or StackOverflow, but had a few books on your desk that
| covered pretty much everything you needed to know. Or if
| you were working on Unix, you had man pages, K&R, and
| Kernigan and Pike's _The UNIX Programming Environment_
| jhoechtl wrote:
| The reason was you weren't competing with the world
| class. Programming was great because you could be a local
| hero.
|
| Now everyone strives to make as beautiful websites as
| <insert big blue with their genius web framework>
| RantyDave wrote:
| We also didn't have security issues, which helped.
| nawgz wrote:
| > Fast forward to today and we are in this clusterfuck,
| where everyone keeps reinventing the wheel and
| complexities just keep growing
|
| Yes, it is quite funny to see how no toolkit exists to
| simply produce Web UIs in a meaningful way.
|
| However, the complexity has grown largely from
| externalities that didn't exist during the time of
| effortless interface builders, which is screen sizes and
| aspect ratios and pixel densities of all sorts. To handle
| this, you need to have some lower level primitives, and
| of course any time you have to go to a lower level you
| surface more complexity.
|
| Final point - as a person who develops web UIs
| professionally for 7 years now, I think that the
| "reinventing the wheel" has been actually quite
| beneficial to tame this complexity. Previously, untyped
| JS had to be bent into surfacing type-style error
| messages, and good luck with boundary crossing data. Now,
| TypeScript lets you describe every key in your
| application and have incredible confidence that a fully-
| typed piece of UI or logic (which of course must avoid
| `any`) will deliver exactly what you intended. GraphQL &
| codegen has given us the ability to type our boundary
| crossing data straight from our DB or resolvers without
| any runtime reflection. Runtime reflection tools like io-
| ts also bridge that gap admirably to program defensively
| in the situations it's needed. It's obviously been
| accompanied by a lot of churn, but with strictly typed
| component libraries, a bit of reusable layout logic, and
| Hasura, I can make sexy fully-themable UIs strictly typed
| all the way to and from the data source without
| significant effort. The complexity in my new paradigm is
| entirely in application-level tricks like UIs visually
| informing users of all the async actions, animations /
| transitions, avoiding dynamic content causing bad layout
| blips, and ensuring user input is never lost. I think
| this kind of thing wouldn't have been easy in any
| oldschool toolkit because it inherently requires some
| wiring that isn't easy to surface
| beamatronic wrote:
| But in today's reality, there is a lot of Javascript that
| is getting "downloaded and installed" into your browser's
| cache. It's all being managed for you and it mostly
| works.
| nawgz wrote:
| Please, you must not be pedantic in this way, it's clear
| that I mean there's no install wizard and OS-native
| interactions the user must go thru, they just provide a
| string URL and immediately begin application-style
| interactions after a brief load
| beamatronic wrote:
| Compare and contrast today's Javascript-in-browser
| dependent applications versus a pure server-side-
| rendering model. With the latter, there is truly no
| software downloaded, only static assets such as images.
| ryanackley wrote:
| No. One man's departure did not bring down Borland. Years after
| this guy left JBuilder was a great product that made them tons
| of money in the early 2000s. Java's popularity explosion (think
| J2EE) came years after the J++ debacle and JBuilder cashed in.
|
| They disappeared because they weren't able to compete with the
| commoditization of Java IDE's (Eclipse) and Microsoft's
| integrated sales channel on Windows (Visual Studio). These two
| things killed their two biggest products.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| They weren't able to compete with those things in the
| early-2000's, yet JetBrains was founded in 2000 and has had
| nothing but growth and success ever since.
|
| The quality of leadership at Borland fell off, and the
| organization lost its vision and ability to execute. Simple
| as that.
| mthoms wrote:
| I suspect JetBrains location in Eastern Europe helped a
| great deal talent-wise.
| randcraw wrote:
| Borland staff also disappeared because M$ made them offers
| that they couldn't refuse. Departing engineers were offered
| megabucks salaries which lasted only a year or two, but were
| enough to decimate the ranks of Borland's talent and wipe out
| the company's skillbase. Of course, Borland wasn't the only
| competitor to receive this kind of attention from M$.
|
| In the 1999 federal prosecution of M$ for antitrust, Judge
| Thomas Penfield Jackson found that 'Microsoft used its
| "market power" to unlawfully "maintain its monopoly in the
| operating system market," violating the Sherman Antitrust
| Act. Microsoft, the Appeals Court found, unfairly used its
| monopoly power to strongarm computer manufacturers, Internet
| access providers, Internet content providers, independent
| software vendors, and companies like AOL, Apple, Intel, and
| Sun Microsystems.'
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/07/09/the-
| microsoft-...
| jbkiv wrote:
| 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.
| jaggs wrote:
| As far as I can tell, Philippe Khan was the reason Borland
| failed.
| jbkiv wrote:
| I have heard a different story (but from Kahn's side): that
| the board did not back him up when he presented his internet
| strategy. He left after that, arguing that the board did not
| have the vision.
| s_severus wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| FpUser wrote:
| 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.
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| I'm starting a Delphi job in the new year, engineering
| software, its good to see it's still around, and I'm looking
| forward to no more HTML :-)
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| 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..
| agumonkey wrote:
| hey apparently someone made a dosbox distro to play with
| borland c++ https://developerinsider.co/download-turbo-c-for-
| windows-7-8...
| eli wrote:
| I think competing directly against Microsoft in the 90s was
| pretty tough, even if you were largely loved by developers
| davidw wrote:
| 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.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| 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.
| zwieback wrote:
| Boy, forgot about OWL, I loved that. I remember the reworked
| version without the custom C++ language extension for event
| handlers wasn't quite as magical.
| pantulis wrote:
| Turbo Vision libraries for DOS where an absolute delight. And I
| clearly remember a Turbo Pascal demo with a breakout game clone
| that was a lesson on object oriented development.
| dugmartin wrote:
| I made a good bit of money in undergrad and grad school
| building software in Turbo Vision in the early 90s.
|
| The biggest project was writing all the software included
| with this college textbook:
| https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/quality-
| cont....
|
| I found out later that the software in that book ended up
| being used in industry, including Jim Beam (the whiskey
| brand) using it in their distillery.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| 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.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Delphi was a leading develment tool for Windows in that era.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Delphi was by far the most productive programming environment
| available for Windows, right up until the bean counters took
| over, and they started raising the prices out of the reach of
| casual developers.
|
| You can do things in Lazarus (the open source IDE based on Free
| Pascal) in minutes that take far, far too long to fiddle with
| in Python/WxBuilder, for example. I wasted weeks of time trying
| to use a "more modern" platform.
| dvh wrote:
| 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.
| eatonphil wrote:
| 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!
| mikewarot wrote:
| The main issue is (and always has been, in my opinion) that
| "Standard" pascal sucks in that it doesn't have standard
| libraries, and thus all of them were just a little too
| different from each other.
|
| Delphi (and Lazarus/Free Pascal) have a largely compatible and
| sane set of libraries that include quite sane string handling
| (you never allocate or deallocate them, the have length, and
| can contain nulls without issue)
|
| The latest versions of things include generics, so you can make
| lists, trees, etc of your defined record type with little to no
| trouble.
|
| Separate compilation of Units means that I almost never wait
| for a compile... it is always sub-second from hitting F9, to
| seeing the thing run.
|
| The two-way tools to edit forms are one of the most productive
| I've ever seen. Borland C++ built a lot of boilerplate to make
| up for the C++ impedance match with their VCL libraries, that
| you couldn't tinker with, or things broke. Delphi/Lazarus don't
| have that issue.
|
| Lazarus doesn't support GIT integration directly, yet, as far
| as I know. If you are doing personal projects, there's no
| reason not to use it.
| bnastic wrote:
| Iirc, Borland literally had to add closures to C++ to make
| their C++ Builder work and be as simple as Delphi in the UI
| editor.
| RickJWagner wrote:
| 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.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| 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.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| 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
| hi41 wrote:
| 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.
| mmphosis wrote:
| I miss floating tool palettes.
| tpmx wrote:
| _Why did Borland fail? (quora.com)_ - June 13, 2015, 263 comments
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9712267
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Good. Yes, earlier this year someone shared it again and the
| post from a former QA Engineer at Borland jumped out.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26018033
| mschaef wrote:
| 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.
| varjag wrote:
| It was also very distinctly DOS/Windows-first product family.
| Microsoft OS slide to irrelevance sealed the fate.
| akyoan wrote:
| > Microsoft OS slide to irrelevance
|
| I wouldn't call 75% of desktop share "irrelevant". Tablets
| are still 20 times less common than PCs. *
|
| * data from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_oper
| ating_syste...
| varjag wrote:
| Doesn't matter what you run your browser in. The lion's
| share of job market for developers is distinctly not
| Windows native applications.
| fourthark wrote:
| But people don't build desktop applications that much
| anymore. Windows, macOS, and Linux as GUI platforms have
| all faded with the Web and smartphones.
|
| It was a huge downgrade in interactive functionality at the
| time, but the Web has slowly built up over the past two
| decades so it is almost as functional.
| q-big wrote:
| > But people don't build desktop applications that much
| anymore.
|
| This might be outside of your echo chamber, but lots of
| companies still very actively build desktop applications
| (also completely new ones) for their own line-of-business
| purposes.
| a4isms wrote:
| "Worse is better:"
|
| https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
| novok wrote:
| What happened is the web replaced most native desktop apps,
| not mobile tablet UIs. There is a reason why web devs are
| the still the most common type of devs, despite mobile
| devices being the most common type of device used today by
| a large mile.
| wkandek wrote:
| 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.
| racl101 wrote:
| Oh gawd, those CDs were everywhere when I was in uni.
| [deleted]
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Micro Focus is a seriously weird company. I'd love to know what
| their story is.
|
| They just seem to acquire defunct software companies. The only
| company that I know they sold again is SuSE. Everything else is
| just merged into Micro Focus. We never hear from the hordes for
| developer that presumable works there, nor do anyone claim to
| be using their products.
|
| It's just a black hole for aging, failing software companies.
| zqna wrote:
| They are betting on inventing a time traveling machine. They
| would carry the stocks of today into the past and sell them
| there, then reinvest it into Apple's and afterwards would be
| returning back. That's what I think.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Legacy software really is their stated core business. Maybe
| that is why they sold Suse again.
| akyoan wrote:
| We found who's maintaining all of this COBOL code after
| all. They must have a lot of legacy-systems developers and
| can probably market themselves for expensive consultancy.
| cafard wrote:
| My employer had Micro Focus COBOL, acquired when we used
| Peoplesoft. That is long gone, but I'm not sure how long
| gone.
| blihp wrote:
| They're using the age old 'roll up' strategy: buy a bunch of
| past their prime products/companies with an installed base,
| bean count them to profitability and then milk them dry. This
| tends to work pretty well with enterprise customers who will
| pay obscene amounts of money for years/decades to maintain
| the status quo.
|
| Once products/companies enter these roll up black holes, they
| are rarely heard from again by anyone other than legacy
| customers.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Their website seems to advertise the fact that they are in
| some the "top 9/10 investment companies, 10/10
| telecommunications, 10/10 pharmaceuticals, 10/10 aerospace
| and defense companies." Not sure how they define topness, but
| maybe they've made a business out of buying up companies with
| lots of contracts in risk-averse fields and doing
| maintenance/collecting renewal fees?
| codr7 wrote:
| 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.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Yep, they brutally tried to trade community goodwill for
| enterpris-ey contracts and quickly lost both.
| pantulis wrote:
| I mean, they even had their own CORBA broker!
| stickfigure wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: CORBA was underrated. For its time, CORBA
| was a decent way of stitching together heterogeneous systems.
| Tediously hand-coding REST APIs was a big step backwards, and
| gRPC is really just catching up to where we were before.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| Thank you!! I did my undergrad thesis around CORBA (showing
| my age...) and you are spot on that the whole world
| proceeded to pile on a whole lot of work in order to make
| everything run over http.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Agreed, but unfortunately so is fashion in this industry.
| atombender wrote:
| And there's Cap'n Proto, which is essentially a reinvention
| of CORBA.
|
| Unlike gRPC, where RPC calls are just functions that take
| pure data arguments and return pure data structs, Cap'n
| Proto allows RPCs to return references to objects. The
| client can hold onto the reference and call methods on it,
| which invoke RPC calls, while the client and server
| runtimes keep track of what the references refer to. So you
| can treat remote objects as if they're local to your
| process.
|
| This "location transparency" feature is at the heart of
| CORBA, and later, Microsoft DCOM and Java RMI. I've never
| used Cap'n Proto, but with CORBA/DCOM/RMI, this is a really
| powerful feature which allows you to work with APIs as if
| they're just in-process libraries. The downside is that if
| you pretend there's no network overhead, you might end up
| designing very inefficient applications, with each method
| call becoming a network roundtrip. It also means a client
| can, if you're not careful, "hog" a remote object and keep
| it from being deallocated, resulting in leaks or excessive
| memory usage.
|
| Basic DCE-style RPC like gRPC is simpler and has more
| predictable performance, since you're forced to consider
| that you're talking to a remote API, just like REST.
| scrumper wrote:
| I remember learning about CORBA in undergrad too. Then a
| few months into my first job, "new guy, go do this
| integration with SOAP/WSDL." Crushed me so hard I went into
| sales.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| The 'never again' part of working with soap for me was
| that Microsofts and Javas soap libraries were more or
| less incompatible for a variety of reasons.
|
| I could handle the xml madness but at least make sure the
| standard is a standard.
|
| I'm pretty happy with rest apis on that front. I can
| always make them work.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah I remember those happy days.
|
| There were some configuration behaviours on the standard
| that had opposite defaults.
| vrodic wrote:
| I was under the impression that a lot of the original team was
| hired by MS and that was the end of Borland that created
| Delphi.
| ccleve wrote:
| Exactly this.
|
| Pascal was a great language, and I wonder how much we've lost
| by having it go by the wayside. It was strongly-typed, easy to
| read, cross-platform, produced native executables, and was
| lightning fast to compile and execute.
|
| I say "was" a great language because it isn't widely used
| today. I miss it.
| thriftwy wrote:
| On the other hand, it was verbose, and most of original
| Pascal ideas were unsound and replaced in Object Pascal with
| ones coming from C.
|
| "Break loop" being a function rather than keyword is serious
| PHP land.
|
| It had better OO than C++, though. I admit it, they managed
| to have a sane and compact statically checked compilable OO.
| qalmakka wrote:
| Also it had sane strings. Strings with sizes, withouth the
| whole null-terminated madness of C which still haunts us
| nowadays.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Languages 10 years older than C have proper strings, in a
| certain sense there are some design decisions common to Go
| and C, regarding adoption of common features.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Also it had sane strings. Strings with sizes
|
| Except they were prefixes on the buffer which was bad and
| not sane, and greatly limited the size of the original
| pascal strings.
|
| And technically they were UCSD strings, not standard
| pascal, and other implementations used e.g. padded strings.
| jstimpfle wrote:
| "Sane" strings that may waste 4 bytes of length field for
| unnecessary count, or may have a 1 or 2 bytes length field
| that proves to be insufficient. Or "sane" strings that
| alloc and dealloc and refcount like mad, bringing the
| application to a stall. "Sane" strings that discourage the
| developer from just coming up with a simple memory
| management scheme that fits the situation at hand.
|
| "Sane" strings that lead to incredible bloat and
| incompatibility, because there is no one true "sane" string
| type, so every module that doesn't know better forces their
| own way onto the user.
| mdip wrote:
| This never, ever bit me in the Pascal days. I suspect
| this was primarily because the stack I was using was
| either "provided by the Borland Pascal standard library"
| pieces, or it was my own Pascal or assembler code.
|
| I had a limited number of calls into a library and a need
| to do a few things that escape me with regard to
| interacting with -- I think -- an 16550 UART[0] and its
| driver, but I don't recall them being particularly nasty
| to deal with. I mean, all things relative -- I was
| expecting these to be nasty to deal with because they
| often involved inline assembler, so the problem of
| "making it behave with the string" wasn't quite as
| pressing as "what the hell am I actually doing here?" :)
|
| [0] My huge project was a bulletin board system in the
| 90s.
| nwiswell wrote:
| Obviously C-style strings can still remain an option
| where they are needed, but in most cases using the 4
| bytes for a length field is a sane default. How many
| buffer overflow attacks have been enabled by that four
| byte savings over the years?
|
| > "Sane" strings that discourage the developer from just
| coming up with a simple memory management scheme that
| fits the situation at hand.
|
| "Sane" compilers that discourage the developer from
| considering the machine level instructions. It's turtles
| all the way down.
|
| There's a reason that Python is so popular and it's not
| performance
| jstimpfle wrote:
| This is not Python so that's a strawman.
| nwiswell wrote:
| By that I meant that there is obviously value in
| abstracting away tasks and details that the programmer
| would otherwise need to manage. That is why compilers
| exist. The value-add for abstracting a string is
| certainly more than the cost of 4 bytes of memory in the
| typical case.
|
| Put another way: optimizing the management of strings in
| memory is almost never the best use of time to make
| progress toward an organization's objectives, and doubly
| so when that kind of micro-tuning can actually introduce
| security risks
| nerdponx wrote:
| I hardly consider four bytes to track the length of a
| string "waste".
|
| I also don't really know why you assume that "sane" means
| "doesn't let you manage memory effectively".
|
| That said, how many applications really are bottlenecked
| by string processing in the first place? I don't care if
| processing Unicode graphemes is slow, as long as it's
| correct and doesn't mangle users' names.
| jstimpfle wrote:
| Well I for one optimized an authorization module of an
| enterprise application written in Delphi by getting rid
| of standard library strings. Speedups where 100x-1000x,
| accelerating application startup time from minutes to
| maybe 3 seconds.
| novok wrote:
| He is probably thinking about the context of the 1980s,
| when a large amount of 3 byte waste (the 1 byte null char
| is a form of 'waste' itself) might have been a problem
| back then.
| jstimpfle wrote:
| Packed structs with char fields of 8 bytes or so are
| still common.
| johnfn wrote:
| The thing is, not every developer wants to care about
| memory management. A lot of us just want to solve user
| problems, and we don't mind too much if we spend a couple
| of extra bytes to do so.
| jstimpfle wrote:
| It's not primarily about the bytes. Heap allocating RAII
| style strings can absolutely kill performance. And they
| are baaaad for modularity. It's all in my OP, why do I
| even repeat?
| kaba0 wrote:
| How is iterating over the string each time you want to do
| anything meaningful better? Also, there is a short string
| optimization, where you can store the string inside the
| pointer , eg. c++ does just that.
| jstimpfle wrote:
| You didn't read my comment right. My statement is there
| isn't one true string type. I didn't say you shouldn't
| use a length field.
|
| Zero terminated strings still make some sense of course -
| ease of reading when looking at byte level
| representation, and moderate cost savings in packed
| structs (4, 8, or 16 byte strings). The former is why I
| zero terminate by default where possible, even when using
| a separate length field stored somewhere else (almost
| always).
| Jtsummers wrote:
| If the length field is 4 bytes then only 3 bytes are
| "wasted" compared to C with its null-terminated strings
| and 1-byte chars. The difference drops if you have wider
| character types. Not to mention the time saved not having
| to scan every string to determine its length.
|
| I always find it weird when people fret about _bytes_ but
| not _cycles_ , especially cycles that have to be spent
| waiting for memory reads.
| yongjik wrote:
| You are thinking as a developer in 2020s, not one in
| 1990s (or earlier). Memory was incredibly precious:
| 16-bit x86 had 64KB segments, so if your data didn't fit
| in, it would be a lot slower. People used _nibbles_ (4
| bits) because the extra instructions dealing with bit
| twiddling was worth the cost.
|
| Basically, no sane programmer in the 90s would be happy
| with a string type that wasted three bytes per object.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yet JOVIAL, NEWP, PL/I, PL/S, PL.8 among other Algol
| dialects managed it.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| CPU cycles were also incredibly precious. It's a
| tradeoff. In the 80s and 90s you also had smaller caches
| so iterating over a string to determine its length was
| more expensive (more likely to hit RAM) than "just"
| reading its length parameter and carrying on with your
| life.
| yongjik wrote:
| Sure everything was more expensive, but not by the same
| factor. Main memory was smaller but also relatively
| _faster_ compared to CPU. Search for "386 simm memory"
| and you'll see 60ns modules. Considering that 386 debuted
| with 12MHz clock, 60 ns is faster than one CPU clock
| cycle!
|
| In other words, "reading the whole string from memory"
| could be a performance problem, but a _less_ serious
| problem for machines of those days, compared to using a
| few more bytes to store the length.
| jstimpfle wrote:
| Scanning for the string length (e.g strlen()) is
| asymptotically worse than reading a fixed size integer,
| so obviously don't do that unless it's a good
| memory/speed tradeoff (i.e. when you know the string is
| at most say, 16 bytes long).
|
| Overall, it seems you didn't read my comment either. Or
| was I _that_ unclear?
| teeray wrote:
| > strongly-typed, easy to read, cross-platform, produced
| native executables, and was lightning fast to compile and
| execute.
|
| Sounds like Go
| doodpants wrote:
| Except that Go is for command line programs and backend
| code; its standard library doesn't include a cross-platform
| GUI API for desktop applications.
| zamadatix wrote:
| What was the stdlib's cross platform GUI like in Pascal?
| codr7 wrote:
| Probably could have been awesome, the Windows flavor
| certainly was; but they dropped Kylix before it got a
| chance to go anywhere.
| pjmlp wrote:
| At least in Germany it is still used enough to have a
| presence on some magazines, and there is an yearly
| conference.
| appleflaxen wrote:
| Embarcadero was a version of Delphi?
|
| I googled it, but it wasn't clear if it was a buy-out, a
| rebrand, or something else.
| jstimpfle wrote:
| from wikipedia, "On May 7, 2008 Borland Software Corporation
| announced that its software development tools division,
| CodeGear, was to be sold to Embarcadero Technologies for an
| expected $23 million price and $7 million in CodeGear
| accounts receivables retained by Borland.[5] The acquisition
| closed on June 30, 2008 for approximately $24.5 million.[6]"
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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.
| GartzenDeHaes wrote:
| 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.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I used to love working with Borland C++ Builder many moons ago.
| shimonabi wrote:
| I'm working with it at my job. I't called Embarcadero now. They
| name their versions after world city names.
| acheron wrote:
| The same thing that happened to Lotus and WordPerfect: Microsoft
| drove them out of business.
| teh_klev wrote:
| Factually not true. I suggest you grab a copy of "In Search of
| Stupidity by Merrill Chapman":
|
| https://www.amazon.co.uk/Search-Stupidity-Twenty-Marketing-D...
|
| Most of these companies from the 80's and 90's foot gunned
| themselves into oblivion or were bought by companies that
| ruined their products.
| petilon wrote:
| > _Factually not true._
|
| No one who was active in the computer industry in the 90s
| will say that. Don't care what that book says.
| fred96 wrote:
| Lotus was not really killed by Microsoft but by IBM...
| thrower123 wrote:
| What happened to Lotus is really just sad. Selling out to IBM,
| who sucked every dime out, then tossing off the desiccated husk
| to HCL to keep it on life support and crank out an enterprise
| security patch from time to time.
| fred96 wrote:
| I 100% agree. I was a Notes Evangelist for + 20 years. Now
| I'm using Nextcloud and hope it will have a long and good
| life.
| TheNewsIsHere wrote:
| You can absolutely still buy WordPerfect. It's alive and well
| at Corel, updated regularly, and is something of a cult
| favorite in the legal field.
|
| Lotus isn't exactly dead. But it's not exactly alive and well
| either.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| rswskg wrote:
| First tool I ever used for converting class diagrams to code.
| Felt pretty cool!
| YesThatTom2 wrote:
| 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.
| mindcrime wrote:
| The ill-conceived idea of rebranding as "Inprise"[1] certainly
| didn't help.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland#Inprise_Corporation_er...
| narag wrote:
| 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.
| fiedzia wrote:
| 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.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Exactly this. Turbo C was the first real C compiler for DOS
| that I could afford, where "real" means that it supported large
| memory model. Before then, the cheap compilers were always
| stripped down to only allow small model (64K instructions/64K
| data). Turbo C was also downright fast, and it cost far less
| than what Microsoft wanted for their compiler. But once we
| actually started writing 32-bit applications, its day in the
| sun had already past.
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| > 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
|
| There is a _lot_ to be said for being easy to get and
| affordable. I gladly give IntelliJ a couple of hundred dollars
| a year, because $10-$20 a month for a superior developer
| experience is worth it to me.
|
| If I was paying their enterprise rate, though ... not a chance.
| Pxtl wrote:
| On the other hand the "we're professional products, you'll
| eat the cost and like it" approach worked fine for Adobe.
| q-big wrote:
| > On the other hand the "we're professional products,
| you'll eat the cost and like it" approach worked fine for
| Adobe.
|
| I know several designers from various areas who do serious
| attempts to free themselves from Adobe's bondage (in
| particular the running costs of the forced subscriptions)
| and are looking for (and partially have found) alternatives
| for doing their work.
| mh- wrote:
| A staggering percentage of Adobe installations in the 90s
| were pirated, even in the US.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I know. Pirated copies of Adobe Flash Creator created an
| entire generation of animators. A shame that no real
| worthy successor has appeared.
| ByteJockey wrote:
| My understanding is that was their model.
|
| If you let teenagers pirate your product, they're already
| familiar with it by the time they get hired. When they
| get hired, the cost to re-train them on something else is
| more expensive than the license (at least, in the short
| term).
| Kye wrote:
| That works as long as:
|
| 1: someone other than the user is footing the bill (bulk
| licensing)
|
| 2: there are no suitable alternatives
|
| Adobe will fade (or be forced to change) over the next 20
| years as different tools pick them apart one niche at a
| time. It's already happening: the Affinity suite, Procreate
| (and similar indie-focused tools), and DaVinci Resolve,
| among others already serve huge niches within the Adobe
| suite quite well. Capture One, which predates Lightroom, is
| getting better as it expands out of the portrait studio.
|
| This is essentially what happened to Microsoft. Macs got
| good (for definitions of good that matter to non-
| enthusiasts), mobile swept up almost all casual computer
| usage, and the web took much of the rest by way of Linux
| and open source. It happened a niche at a time until the
| world outside was too big to fully EEE.
| EastSmith wrote:
| The Delphi version we used cost $3000 per developer ~
| 2003-2005.
| mamcx wrote:
| Yeah, this is it.
|
| BTW, I still moderator in https://www.clubdelphi.com (despite
| not working on Delphi anymore, like many there!) and see how
| much mind-share Borland and later lost on the small-
| bussines/solo-developer side.
|
| You can't imagine how much in the official forums people ask
| for not ruin it and put real features, and the things that get
| implemented were so out of touch.
|
| Also, is pretty similar how MS ruin Fox/VB (except not even
| sell it after): Burn the goodwill in the low-end... in the hope
| them move to costly products -sql server, ejm- ... and then
| lost that people to the rising of open source.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > Internet and Linux came, and with them Perl, PHP, Python and
| others. Borland missed the boat
|
| Actually, they were looking at new (by then) technologies. C++
| Builder was a reality in the late 90s, Kylix (essentially
| Delphi for Linux) was released in 2000; I attended one
| demonstration by Marco Cantu himself. The problem with
| Borland/Inprise/Embarcadero was that they weren't giving a damn
| about small developers but wanted to play only in the
| enterprise world, an ill choice that backfired spectacularly.
| If they could exchange a few ideas with the developers behind
| Lazarus, and could help them some way but guaranteeing it stays
| free no strings attached, both worlds could benefit from it.
| Lazarus needs some more work and a name to become well known
| outside of the Delphi nostalgic developers world, and newer
| Delphi and related tools need a much cheaper product to attract
| developers in long ignored market segment.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| "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.
| rstupek wrote:
| We used jbuilder and it was a great product, simpler to use
| than eclipse but it's hard to compete with free and good enough
| ransom1538 wrote:
| Yeah as a kid i remember staring at the jbuilder box in a
| "computer store". I wanted it so bad. But never had the
| money.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Yet JetBrains survives.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Which is fascinating to watch. As it is quite uncommon in
| today's world.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| That's an understatement. JetBrains has a strong continual
| growth.
| speed_spread wrote:
| It might have saved them to go with the JetBrains model of a
| free "Community" edition along with paid supported options but
| that's probably not a jump that the uninspired management would
| have been willing to make.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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.
| chihuahua wrote:
| Is there something wrong with hiring engineers from a
| competitor? Should they have had a no-poaching agreement like
| Apple and Google had a few years ago? That was deemed illegal
| if I remember correctly.
| Kranar wrote:
| In and of itself no, but courts have ruled that there's a
| distinction between hiring people to make use of their talent
| vs. hiring people to deny said talent to the competition.
|
| Was Microsoft targeting Borland employees because Microsoft
| was looking to make use of their talent for their own
| products; that's legitimate. However, if Microsoft was hiring
| Borland employees for the purpose of keeping those employees
| from working at Borland; that's potentially predatory and
| violates antitrust laws.
|
| Note that it's not even in the employee's best interest in
| the case of predatory hiring. Much like with predatory
| pricing, once Borland goes out of business as a result of
| said practice, Microsoft is unlikely to continue retaining
| many of those employees or paying lucrative salaries and the
| overall pool of talent as well as salaries is likely to
| shrink in the long run.
|
| It's the nature of predatory actions that they hurt the actor
| in the short run but benefit them in the long run whereas the
| public gains in the short run but is damaged in the long run.
| pbreit wrote:
| 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
| mikeabraham wrote:
| They flew too close to the sun.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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?
| h2odragon wrote:
| I sorta had the feeling he fell victim to "cult of personality"
| eventually. Everybody telling him he was so great he lost touch
| with reality. Or was he never actually connected in the first
| place?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I didn't know him well enough to know if he emanated a
| "Reality Distortion Field" like Jobs and Holmes did.
|
| But he was very charismatic.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I did learn one technique from this. I finally managed to put a
| stop to Capitol One sending me credit card offers in the mail
| practically every day. I'd write over the offer letter in heavy
| red crayon a profanity-laced diatribe and mail it back in their
| business reply envelope. It took several tries, but the CO junk
| mail finally ceased.
| ctdonath wrote:
| Borland logo was prominently displayed on a high-profile building
| in Atlanta until a few years ago. Surprised they lasted so long.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Microsoft bought their brains:
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/borland-sues...
| grlass wrote:
| 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.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| It's night and day. The debuggers in those two tools were very
| easy to use, very visual, but surprisingly powerful.
|
| I cry a little on the inside when I see developers using Visual
| Studio and resorting to printf statements (or the equivalent)
| because they've _never even tried to use the debugger_ , ever.
| __d wrote:
| You should try the Visual Studio debugger one day. It's kinda
| the yardstick for graphical debuggers.
|
| gdb is a fine tool, but I think the VS debugger is reasonably
| described as "next level".
|
| Many people don't know about Microsoft's other debugger,
| WinDbg. It's actually more capable than the VS debugger, but
| the UI is closer to that of gdb.
| grlass wrote:
| I would be keen to try, but afaik there's no way to do it on
| Linux which is my main dev/deploy environment.
|
| It feels like Linux debugging is stuck in a viscous cycle,
| since few people are putting the capital into a decent
| debugger UI, and thus few people are using debugging UIs (and
| thus using printf debugging, or gdb CLI). Folk might not
| realise how much better it could be.
| nrdvana wrote:
| I'd say Delphi was one notch better than Visual Studio. The
| pascal language was more highly optimized and easier to parse,
| so the debugger was much snappier about popping up the tooltips
| to show you values of variables or F1 to jump into the help
| pages. I remember being especially disappointed with VS because
| they would spend hundreds of MB of your precious disk space
| installing the entire Microsoft Knowledge Base, and the hitting
| F1 on a code statement would bring up a mishmash of Visual
| Basic examples (while developing C++) for almost but not the
| right class. In Delphi, it always knew exactly what class you
| were dealing with and would open the correct help page before
| your finger was fully off of the function key. The help pages
| had been expertly written to show you the most important
| details first, and were easy to browse. Really, I'm surprised I
| don't see more people reminiscing about those help files. There
| was probably as much effort put into that as into the
| frameworks or compiler or IDE.
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