5 ms·

IMHO the biggest loss was Borland. They had some quality products, innovated and supported software developers. Not every product was a winner, but there were

IMHO the biggest loss was Borland. They had some quality products, innovated and supported software developers. Not every product was a winner, but there were some great dev tools (c++ compiler, Delphi, Pascal). But in the end I actually have no idea what went wrong and how they disappeared so quickly.

sgtnasty 4y ago
That's a name I have not heard in a while, but Borland C++ was a great tool back in the day. So was their database product, which I forget the name. Then it was like in 1 night Borland was gone. I think MS had something to do it. It just happened so fast.
- vparikh 4y ago
  That db product was Paradox I believe. Yes Microsoft had a lot to do with it. Microsoft in its embrace and extend strategy would keep adding / mucking around with the C/C++ compilers by introducing proprietary extensions that always kept Borland one step behind. Delphi was the gem in Borland's development tool stack. Made Microsoft's Visual Basic look like a toy. It was so far ahead of just about every desktop development platform of the time. How did Microsoft handle that threat? They stole the lead developer of the Delphi compiler Anders Hejlsberg - who joined Microsoft and is the chief architect of .Net framework. In fact - if a lot of .Net concepts are direct implementations of Delphi and the VCL (properties, etc.) Yep, Microsoft stole the one certified genius coder right from Borland. And the rest is history.
  - lioeters 4y ago
    > Anders Hejlsberg He left Borland and joined Microsoft in 1996. The year before, Philippe Kahn resigned as chairman, CEO and president, after 12 years at the company. I don't know if that was a symptom or cause of Borland's demise, but losing such key players must have been the nail in its coffin. Anders Hejlsberg is one of my heroes, a giant in the programming world, being the creative genius behind Turbo Pascal (which I grew up with as a child), Delphi, .NET Framework, C#, and TypeScript (which I write regularly as a professional with greying beard).
- neuro 4y ago
  Also, their C++ OWL framework was way ahead of the competition.
zafka 4y ago
Turbo C++ 3.0 I was sad when it stopped running on windows ( at V10 I think )
h2odragon 4y ago
Sometime after Borland died as a real company, but before the corpse stopped shambling about, I had a buddy working there. They did a death march push to get the next version of Delphi out the door, 3 months and more of that poor person being at their desk 12-20hr a day. Then they fired the bulk of the team days after they shipped, the week before Christmas. Antics like that helped speed their demise.
GnarfGnarf 4y ago
Borland C++ ver. 3 was a great product, vastly superior to Microsoft's Programmer's Workbench (character-based UI). However, when we upgraded to Borland 4, we encountered catastrophic bugs: Symbols were flagged as undefined that were successfully linked a few modules earlier. Use of 'new' operator in a DLL crashed the program (that one cost us two weeks). To be clear: these were bugs in the compiler, as they had compiled & run with no problem in the previous version. We had to switch to Visual Studio.
dan_hawkins 4y ago
They went after enterprise market willing to sacrifice their main base of individual/small clients.
hintymad 4y ago
They lost to MS because, at least to a large part, they optimized for the wrong thing. They were just like WordPerfect, placing raw performance above everything. As a result, Borland C++ was way behind the release cycle of Win32 as the company thought that the full control offered by MS DOS was too precious to let go. When Borland finally came around, Visual Studio already took over. That they spent great resources on other languages, such as Object Pascal with Delphi (a great IDE, by the way), did not help much either. It also baffled me why they decided to pivot to SLCM solutions -- the term alone would put me to sleep, but maybe I'm too narrow minded.

sgtnasty 4y ago

That's a name I have not heard in a while, but Borland C++ was a great tool back in the day. So was their database product, which I forget the name. Then it was like in 1 night Borland was gone. I think MS had something to do it. It just happened so fast.

vparikh 4y ago
That db product was Paradox I believe. Yes Microsoft had a lot to do with it. Microsoft in its embrace and extend strategy would keep adding / mucking around with the C/C++ compilers by introducing proprietary extensions that always kept Borland one step behind. Delphi was the gem in Borland's development tool stack. Made Microsoft's Visual Basic look like a toy. It was so far ahead of just about every desktop development platform of the time. How did Microsoft handle that threat? They stole the lead developer of the Delphi compiler Anders Hejlsberg - who joined Microsoft and is the chief architect of .Net framework. In fact - if a lot of .Net concepts are direct implementations of Delphi and the VCL (properties, etc.) Yep, Microsoft stole the one certified genius coder right from Borland. And the rest is history.
- lioeters 4y ago
  > Anders Hejlsberg He left Borland and joined Microsoft in 1996. The year before, Philippe Kahn resigned as chairman, CEO and president, after 12 years at the company. I don't know if that was a symptom or cause of Borland's demise, but losing such key players must have been the nail in its coffin. Anders Hejlsberg is one of my heroes, a giant in the programming world, being the creative genius behind Turbo Pascal (which I grew up with as a child), Delphi, .NET Framework, C#, and TypeScript (which I write regularly as a professional with greying beard).
neuro 4y ago
Also, their C++ OWL framework was way ahead of the competition.

zafka 4y ago

Turbo C++ 3.0 I was sad when it stopped running on windows ( at V10 I think )

h2odragon 4y ago

Sometime after Borland died as a real company, but before the corpse stopped shambling about, I had a buddy working there. They did a death march push to get the next version of Delphi out the door, 3 months and more of that poor person being at their desk 12-20hr a day. Then they fired the bulk of the team days after they shipped, the week before Christmas. Antics like that helped speed their demise.

GnarfGnarf 4y ago

Borland C++ ver. 3 was a great product, vastly superior to Microsoft's Programmer's Workbench (character-based UI). However, when we upgraded to Borland 4, we encountered catastrophic bugs: Symbols were flagged as undefined that were successfully linked a few modules earlier. Use of 'new' operator in a DLL crashed the program (that one cost us two weeks). To be clear: these were bugs in the compiler, as they had compiled & run with no problem in the previous version. We had to switch to Visual Studio.

dan_hawkins 4y ago

They went after enterprise market willing to sacrifice their main base of individual/small clients.

hintymad 4y ago

They lost to MS because, at least to a large part, they optimized for the wrong thing. They were just like WordPerfect, placing raw performance above everything. As a result, Borland C++ was way behind the release cycle of Win32 as the company thought that the full control offered by MS DOS was too precious to let go. When Borland finally came around, Visual Studio already took over. That they spent great resources on other languages, such as Object Pascal with Delphi (a great IDE, by the way), did not help much either. It also baffled me why they decided to pivot to SLCM solutions -- the term alone would put me to sleep, but maybe I'm too narrow minded.