4 ms·
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.
by mschaef 5y ago
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 5y agoIt was also very distinctly DOS/Windows-first product family. Microsoft OS slide to irrelevance sealed the fate.
- akyoan 5y ago> 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_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
- novok 5y agoWhat 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.
- varjag 5y agoDoesn't matter what you run your browser in. The lion's share of job market for developers is distinctly not Windows native applications.
- fourthark 5y agoBut 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.
- a4isms 5y ago“Worse is better:” https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
- q-big 5y ago> 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.
- fourthark 5y agoAgree, I should have specified “for the mass market”. Totally different inside the enterprise, one reason Borland & Embarcadero focused on it.