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 p

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.