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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++ a

by JJMcJ 5y 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.

satisfice 5y ago
OS/2 was not a problem for Borland? Why? Because IBM paid us to do that! We didn’t lose money on that. Or not MUCH money, anyway. The license agreement thing was a failure of imagination. The project team didn’t ever think we needed to review legal language. But after that fiasco we made sure that we did. I tell that story in my classes. You are right about slipping quality. It was just an unsustainable rate of development. I was ringing alarm bells inside the team, and management was hearing them, but they said “look, either we ship or we start laying off the team.” So you are mostly right.
- JJMcJ 5y ago
  Phillipe Kahn seemed bitter over OS/2. Perhaps using up the company's intellectual resources, when the resources could have been better used elsewhere, money from IBM or no money. But that's just a guess for why.
  - satisfice 5y ago
    I don’t know if any other part of the company worked on OS/2. But in the languages group it was one of those death march projects that helped forge the team into a better working unit. The project was bad but I missed the people I worked with when it was over. And like I said, IBM footed a lot of the bill for it. I think the secret to Borland’s fall is mostly that we had to earn our way forward, whereas Microsoft could write huge checks to itself. It’s like we were playing a video game against someone using cheats.
    - JJMcJ 5y ago
      > Microsoft . . . huge checks E.g., any company smaller than MSFT would have been destroyed by the endless Word For Windows effort.

by JJMcJ 5y ago

satisfice 5y ago

OS/2 was not a problem for Borland? Why? Because IBM paid us to do that! We didn’t lose money on that. Or not MUCH money, anyway. The license agreement thing was a failure of imagination. The project team didn’t ever think we needed to review legal language. But after that fiasco we made sure that we did. I tell that story in my classes. You are right about slipping quality. It was just an unsustainable rate of development. I was ringing alarm bells inside the team, and management was hearing them, but they said “look, either we ship or we start laying off the team.” So you are mostly right.

JJMcJ 5y ago
Phillipe Kahn seemed bitter over OS/2. Perhaps using up the company's intellectual resources, when the resources could have been better used elsewhere, money from IBM or no money. But that's just a guess for why.
- satisfice 5y ago
  I don’t know if any other part of the company worked on OS/2. But in the languages group it was one of those death march projects that helped forge the team into a better working unit. The project was bad but I missed the people I worked with when it was over. And like I said, IBM footed a lot of the bill for it. I think the secret to Borland’s fall is mostly that we had to earn our way forward, whereas Microsoft could write huge checks to itself. It’s like we were playing a video game against someone using cheats.
  - JJMcJ 5y ago
    > Microsoft . . . huge checks E.g., any company smaller than MSFT would have been destroyed by the endless Word For Windows effort.