“Far superior... at making basic 90s UIs that nobody else wants today. For better or worse, but the reality is nobody wants them anymore. Branding is a thing. W

“Far superior... at making basic 90s UIs that nobody else wants today. For better or worse, but the reality is nobody wants them anymore. Branding is a thing. When a client wanted something different you used to tell them "You can't have that" and they had to take it, because there was no other option.” Were you actually there in the 90s and 00s or are you just imagining how things could have been? I personally developed fully skinned UIs in Delphi’s cousin, C++ builder on Windows in the late 90s and in the 00s. In addition to that, VCL apps had a rich palette of drag & drop widgets, including commercial products that were better than anything the competition was offering, including Microsoft. I used a lot of Windows apps over the years and literally everything from custom windows shapes, colors and background, to custom widgets and cursors, etc I’ve ever seen was possible to develop in Delphi or C++ builder. ”The instant web enabled and normalized arbitrary UIs, "You can't have that" Delphi people simply went out of business. Because it turned out Delphi was far inferior at doing what people actually wanted.” Delphi was mismanaged by Borland, sabotaged by Microsoft and they charged a ton of money for the software. Starting with WinForms and C# MS finally had a reasonably competitive alternative to offer. The web had nothing to do with Delphi’s decline. In the 00s we used a combination of back-end languages with some JS for enhancement and Flash for special cases or multimedia-heavy sites. Macromedia Flash remained the most capable web-based technology for a long time after Delphi was already in decline. As a former Flash developer, I can say confidently that Flash and Delphi/C++ Builder served different use-cases and were not competing with each-other.