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A few people might say that it worked for Borland back in the '80s when they released Turbo Pascal. Most compilers back then were in the vicinity of $1000+, an

A few people might say that it worked for Borland back in the '80s when they released Turbo Pascal. Most compilers back then were in the vicinity of $1000+, and were complex beasts. The comes along Borland with a compiler that fitted on a single floppy disk for $69, and it could compile code in the order of 100x faster than the nearest competitor. The rest is history. But I think that the point people miss was that as well as being less than 1/10th of the price of incumbents, Turbo Pascal ALSO promised a hundred fold increase in performance. If they had brought out a bloated C compiler on a 19 disk installation pack that ran in the same time as the Microsoft C compiler that came on 20 disks, I don't think it would have been game on. Plus, Borland also swamped all the popular magazines with brash, full page ads that were the antithesis of the staid developer tool ads of the day. As others have pointed out - there are many more things than price which are important.

manquer 9y ago
There should more to this story.. If their product was that much better (it clearly was) there is no logical reason to not also price it 1000$ and it would have still sold almost the same. considering the 100x speed increase it probably have sold at 2000$ almost the same as a premium compiler. Something else made Borland sell it that cheap, either competition was going to release the same boost or they were reaching a new larger segment entirely , i don't think it was about just being lower cost with extra features
- cyberferret 9y ago
  > there is no logical reason to not also price it 1000$ and it would have still sold almost the same Maybe not. In my case, I was just out of school in the 80's and would never be able to have afforded a $1000+ compiler. When Turbo Pascal came out at that price point, I jumped on it. It was my chance to do some 'real' programming at a budget friendly price. Even IBM's Macro Assembler at that time was several hundred dollars. I would credit Borland and providing the launchpad for thousands and thousands of students, hobbyists and amateur enthusiasts to start their programming careers, who never would have otherwise. My first program I sold for $$$ was written in Turbo Pascal.
  - cyberferret 9y ago
    Correction: "I would credit Borland *for providing the launchpad..." And in thinking about what I wrote above, I seriously believe that if it wasn't for Borland bringing out a $69 compiler all those years ago, I would be in a totally different profession today. It seriously was the catalyst for me becoming a programmer.
cyberferret 9y ago
For some nostalgic value - here was that ad [0] in Byte and PC Magazine etc. back in the '80s. I seem to remember that $49.95 was USD but the software was AUD$69 over here in Australia?? I could be wrong. Another point I realised from this ad, was that Turbo Pascal was one of the first compilers to actually include the editor portion as well, as part of the total package, including the ability to compile directly from within the editor. A precursor to the modern day IDE, I guess. In a lot of way, really innovative work from Anders Heljsberg and Borland - they really broke a lot of new ground with Turbo Pascal and like I said above, they really opened up programming for a lot of people who might have otherwise taken a different path due to cost. [0] - https://community.embarcadero.com/files/2008/11/turbopascalv1bytead_814.jpg https://community.embarcadero.com/files/2008/11/turbopascalv...

manquer 9y ago

There should more to this story.. If their product was that much better (it clearly was) there is no logical reason to not also price it 1000$ and it would have still sold almost the same. considering the 100x speed increase it probably have sold at 2000$ almost the same as a premium compiler. Something else made Borland sell it that cheap, either competition was going to release the same boost or they were reaching a new larger segment entirely , i don't think it was about just being lower cost with extra features

cyberferret 9y ago
> there is no logical reason to not also price it 1000$ and it would have still sold almost the same Maybe not. In my case, I was just out of school in the 80's and would never be able to have afforded a $1000+ compiler. When Turbo Pascal came out at that price point, I jumped on it. It was my chance to do some 'real' programming at a budget friendly price. Even IBM's Macro Assembler at that time was several hundred dollars. I would credit Borland and providing the launchpad for thousands and thousands of students, hobbyists and amateur enthusiasts to start their programming careers, who never would have otherwise. My first program I sold for $$$ was written in Turbo Pascal.
- cyberferret 9y ago
  Correction: "I would credit Borland *for providing the launchpad..." And in thinking about what I wrote above, I seriously believe that if it wasn't for Borland bringing out a $69 compiler all those years ago, I would be in a totally different profession today. It seriously was the catalyst for me becoming a programmer.

cyberferret 9y ago

For some nostalgic value - here was that ad [0] in Byte and PC Magazine etc. back in the '80s. I seem to remember that $49.95 was USD but the software was AUD$69 over here in Australia?? I could be wrong. Another point I realised from this ad, was that Turbo Pascal was one of the first compilers to actually include the editor portion as well, as part of the total package, including the ability to compile directly from within the editor. A precursor to the modern day IDE, I guess. In a lot of way, really innovative work from Anders Heljsberg and Borland - they really broke a lot of new ground with Turbo Pascal and like I said above, they really opened up programming for a lot of people who might have otherwise taken a different path due to cost. [0] - https://community.embarcadero.com/files/2008/11/turbopascalv1bytead_814.jpg https://community.embarcadero.com/files/2008/11/turbopascalv...