18 ms·

Why did Borland fail?

381 points by networked 11y ago

Aqwis 11y ago
You could ask the same question about companies such as Novell or Sun.
- melling 11y ago
  Sun ignored the rise of commodity hardware. They were relying on the Internet and Wall Street bubble in the late 90's. When those both popped, a Sun took a big hit. Anyway, why does answering this help with Borland?
  - asveikau 11y ago
    Sun also had an overpriced compiler, to go with the overpriced Unix running on overpriced hardware. Then it saw these replaced with free, free, and cheaper products, respectively.
    - melling 11y ago
      Sun made its money from hardware. I never worked anywhere that used Sun's compilers. It was always gcc.
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        I did. We always used the UNIX vendor compilers back when I was doing UNIX development in the .com days.
    - webreac 11y ago
      Their hardware was too expensive, but their support was too cheap. When oracle has changed the prices, it has more than double the cost of support. Sun has developped a lot of software that was given for free (AFAIK): NFS, NIS, ...
    - rodgerd 11y ago
      Sun were, in many ways, the worst of the commercial Unixes, they just had a very loud fan base insisting they were the One True Unix. Consider how long it took to get a journaling filesystem, never mind volume management!
  - mindcrime 11y ago
    > Anyway, why does answering this help with Borland? It would be interesting to explore whether or not there are any commonalities in terms of what happened to Sun, Novell, Borland, etc. And if there are, it might be interesting, in turn, to ask if any of those lessons would be useful to contemporary software companies (especially startups, given the audience here at HN). I suspect that there are some common factors that could be found, but I don't have a good feel for what they are off-hand, aside from falling back on cliches or tautologies.
    - pjc50 11y ago
      The common factor would have to be that they were squeezed by both Microsoft and Linux. Sun sold "Enterprise" UNIX until Linux-on-Intel was good enough. Novell sold networking until Windows+AD was good enough (round about the launch of Vista). Borland sold IDEs until free IDEs were good enough, and also traditional client-server dev went out of fashion along with a language migration.
  - huhtenberg 11y ago
    > Sun ignored the rise of commodity hardware. Sun's got nothing on SGI in that department :)
- brudgers 11y ago
  Or Wildcat! BBS. http://hanselminutes.com/161/bbss-and-wildcat-from-mustang-software http://hanselminutes.com/161/bbss-and-wildcat-from-mustang-s...
asveikau 11y ago
Compilers used to be something you paid money for. It took a while, but open source and I would say gcc in particular killed that. It's funny how gcc was around for a long time, but it was only in the 2000s that cash cow compilers started dying. I think that coincides a bit with Linux and OS X becoming popular for developers. For example, it wasn't until 2005 that Microsoft started providing a VS express SKU. You see Linux start to kill old school commercial Unix (like Sun) around the same time. Probably the same trend.
- RogerL 11y ago
  I remember in the 90s advocating for things like gcc and the absolute scorn I would receive. "A free compiler!!! What kind of crap must that be??". You paid for compilers, you paid for your version control, you paid for your bug tracker, and that was that. Interestingly, at that company (a defense contractor) it was the government more than anything that changed that attitude. There were a lot of projects initiated by the DoD designed to test whether Linux and other open software were a good choice. Attitudes slowly came around. And it (paid=good) is not an entirely unfounded position. There was some really bad OS software, and Visual Studio is still top by some measures (quality of the debugger). But the amount of pain noncompliance of the VS compiler brought was just frustrating. And if you want really fast code on x86 it still makes sense to buy the Intel compilers (C++ and Fortran).
  - Retric 11y ago
    It's important to note that Visual Studio got a lot of love from MS above and beyond what it's revenues would support. Likewise Intel have gcc a lot of love because they needed to get software used to longer pipelines.
  - douche 11y ago
    If the VS debugger is king of the hill, then it must be really grim out there. At least half the time, I'm using printf debugging because actually running in the debugger brings my entire machine (16 GB RAM, quad-core intel) to a standstill.
e3pi 11y ago
See Wikipedia on where Phillipe's successes have been and is doing today: a smart watch running 2 yrs per charge. His horolog tech is being pursued by at least two Swiss firms in the Jura. 'Phillipe the Phoenix` is a facile adaptor I admire.
adrianlmm 11y ago
I used Delphi for more tan 10 years, so this is what I believe it went wrong: * They lost Anders Hejlsberg * Free compilers got aceptable. * Lack of back compatibility, new VCL components from one version weren't compatible with older ones, every new versión require to biy the new components. * To expensive. * No new books to learn Delphi, they are to old. I'm still using Delphi 7 for some projects.
- lbruder 11y ago
  Still using D7 nearly everyday, alongside XE7 at work. The impressive, yet sad, thing is 2002's Delphi 7 still runs circles around XE7. Fast, robust, sound documentation. Even Visual Studio and IntelliJ feel weird compared to the simplicity of that old IDE. Sure, lots of parts are missing, no refactoring, no reformatting, whatever. For me it's more fun to use D7 than anything else at the moment. Bad sign.
  - hibikir 11y ago
    That's not really about the IDE side of Delphi, but the compiler and runtime side of Delphi. It was an absolutely awesome product, targeting the individual developer or small team, writing a custom application. Nothing I've ever worked since compares for that. But it's limitations are the same as Ruby on Rails limitations: Wonderful at one thing, only a headache anywhere else, and as we ask developers to do other things, the tools just stop being quite so good. Looking at what we do on websites today, and how much it costs to build it, it sure feels like we've been taking steps backwards for quite a while.
- yoodenvranx 11y ago
  Even after not using it for 10 years I miss Delphi a lot. You could click a UI together in a very short time, add some code and you had a running standalone .exe without the need of any runtime dlls. Yes, Delphi it was limited in some ways and the language was not the best, but is was (and in my opinion still is) the best way to easily create a "simple" standalone gui applications.
  - 11y ago
stared 11y ago
Answers to two (closed) Stack Exchange questions are relevant: What happened to Borland Delphi? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/83009/what-happened-to-borland-delphi http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/83009/what-ha... Why has C prevailed over Pascal? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/114846/why-has-c-prevailed-over-pascal http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/114846/why-ha...
- escaped_hn 11y ago
  A closed stackexchange question? Ya don't say!
  - ta92929 11y ago
    And here I thought it was just the stackoverflow mods that closed everything and you were supposed to take stuff like this to stackexchange.
ape4 11y ago
Microsoft poached some people. http://www.zdnet.com/article/borland-sues-ms-over-staff-poaching/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/borland-sues-ms-over-staff-poac...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
alecco 11y ago
Not a single mention of all the dirty tricks by Microsoft?! What a shallow memory. I remember how Microsoft cornered Borland and others to use some undocumented features of their OS, then make them incompatible. Remember, back in the 90s updating software on mass scale was a PITA, end users were expected to never update. Also abusing their dominance to aggressively target key developers and contractors, copying any good application in the ecosystem and bundling it. But SV didn't learn the lesson and we are now in more abusive walled gardens for or mobile phones. And some young people parroting how wonderful Microsoft and Bill Gates are today.
- nadams 11y ago
  > And some young people parroting how wonderful Microsoft and Bill Gates are today. Compared to what Microsoft used to be like - recently Microsoft has made some pretty, surprising, awesome moves. Specifically their open source movement (including .Net). You would never have seen that 10-20 years ago. I'm sure if you walked into Gates's office and said "I think we should open source this" - I have a feeling he would fire you on the spot. They even now support Linux on their Azure platform - and that's not a it-will-run-but-you-are-on-your-own. Now, I'm not saying Microsoft is a saint or that I would want to work for them. But considering they didn't take action against the mono or ReactOS projects makes them ok in my book (not that they would have any real legal case - but they could drag those projects through an expensive lawsuit which would just end up with a deal to cease development).
  - FrankenPC 11y ago
    I was going to say the same. The move to open source .net is brilliant. I wonder if some enterprising company will try to convert .net into asm.js so we can run it in the browsers.
    - bliti 11y ago
      What do you reason would be the benefit of doing that?
welshguy 11y ago
Eclipse.
- babuskov 11y ago
  Actually, what made me stop using Borland (C++ Builder) was switching to Linux (going to open source GCC and wxWidgets library) and web (Browsers and PHP getting good enough to build bigger projects in it). Borland failed to deliver usable solutions for Linux and web at the time and after I got used to new tools I simply did not bother to try anymore.
_ak 11y ago
As a former Borland employee (not for very long, 2006-2009, and actually working in their Austrian offices, which originally became part of the company through the Segue acquisition), I certainly didn't have the complete picture, but our managers, even going as far as those located in Cupertino, and later Austin, were quite open about what Borland's issue was: even with the rise of Java, they thought they could continue in the IDE business like they did before. Apparently, JBuiler used to be their #1 cash cow. Well, until Eclipse came along: within 18 months, JBuilder license sales dropped to essentially zero. They eventually realized that the whole IDE market was dead, so that was spun off into CodeGear, JBuilder was relaunched as an Eclipse distribution with "premium" extensions, and CodeGear was ultimately sold to Embarcadero, while the rest of the company was trying to refocus on producing software for other parts of the development lifecycle, from requirements management to automated testing and test management (hence Segue) to SCM. Company performance was atrocious, and that really screwed over people that took part in the employee share program, but they somehow managed to make it over to get acquired by Micro Focus.
- meddlepal 11y ago
  Someone should tell JetBrains the whole IDE market is dead.
  - CydeWeys 11y ago
    Borland was also many times JetBrains' headcount at its peak, and even today is significantly larger. It doesn't follow that because a market supports a company of one size, it must also support a company of a much larger size.
    - adevine 11y ago
      Exactly. I also wonder whether it would even have been possible to start Jetbrains in the US. Being based in the Czech Republic gave them a much lower cost structure, and in the beginning, competing with Eclipse's free price tag meant noone could ever have supported a sizable company in the US.
avodonosov 11y ago
As good guess as any else.
protomyth 11y ago
In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yokam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yokam replied without hesitation "Absolutely." They stopped selling $49.95 compilers with IDEs and tried to be an enterprise company. People still buy IDEs and compilers. If they had kept doing what they were doing and improving their products, they would have been fine. Instead, they wanted the big money and it didn't happen.
- bluedino 11y ago
  They also sold $299 and $499 compilers It's weird thinking we used to pay for compilers
  - protomyth 11y ago
    We still pay for text editors and IDEs. Heck, people still sell compilers. I am saying those $299 and $399 price points were mistakes.
  - DCoder 11y ago
    > It's weird thinking we used to pay for compilers People still do. For example, Intel sells several compilers: https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-compilers https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-compilers
gjkood 11y ago
I have to say that Borland TurboPascal 3.0 (or earlier) was one of the finest pieces of software that I have ever seen. A full fledged Pascal compiler and a Wordstar compatible editor in a 29K binary. Where have those days gone?
- FrankenPC 11y ago
  The speed of the compiler! What an amazing environment. If they had continued to evolve with the tech industry they would have been gods.
troymc 11y ago
I laughed at "...building the software analogs of sewer systems, utility poles, or synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats." It derives from a Steven Wright Joke: "All of the people in my building are insane. The guy above me designs synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats. The lady across the hall tried to rob a department store... with a pricing gun... She said, "Give me all of the money in the vault, or I'm marking down everything in the store..." http://www.humournet.com/misc.humour/steven_wright.txt http://www.humournet.com/misc.humour/steven_wright.txt
revanx_ 11y ago
Borland had its moments, Delphi(RAD successor to Turbo Pascal) was a total hit with Delphi 7 being the pinacle, unfortunatelly after that all went down the hill. Later on in 2008 Embarcadero Technologies picked up Delphi and has been selling it ever since. If anyone is interested, Delphi today is on life support and exists only because it still has a strong base of followers from the Borland time. The rapid cost of development has pushed Delphi out of reach for younger generations who are not used to paying for development tools.
ads_are_shite 11y ago
The problem is IDES always end up shit. Even revered ones end up shitting the bed. Light weight development practises - a-la-vim will always win out in the long run.
bbarn 11y ago
Turbo Pascal was the first software I remember buying in a retail box. Before then it was all copied and school-given software, but something in 15 year old me really felt it was worth buying this tool. It was. That purchase spawned a career out of my evening hobby. Then, a few years later, when I was mostly using C or VB, and only firing up Pascal for fun now and then, Delphi came out. I was super excited. Until I realized I could barely use it, and none of my local book stores had anything on it that was helpful to read. By the time the internet came along, and I got into full time development.. .net was out, with "academic" pricing for VS 2003. That purchase brought me real jobs, at real companies. So, for me.. Borland got me curious, got me hooked, then I switched to tools that got me money. Maybe that's because the ecosystem had changed, but I can't be the only one.
- FrankenPC 11y ago
  You sound like me. 15 years old and Turbo Pascal was a mind blowing experience for me. Especially in the graphics arena. UCSD physics department hired me to convert their particle collision vector data (Monte Carlo calculations) into a 3D graphics representation. That was a hell of an experience for me.
- laumars 11y ago
  > By the time the internet came along, and I got into full time development.. .net was out, with "academic" pricing for VS 2003. The web was around for about decade before Microsoft .NET arrived. In fact I remember coding Delphi in an evaluation copy of the IDE given away on a cover CD from .Net magazine (not to be confused with Microsoft .NET). And then a few years later downloading a pirated copy of a beta release of Visual Studio .NET. It was actually the web that introduced me to Borland's Windows IDEs. I'd used Turbo Pascal extensively, but then got hooked on Visual Studio once I migrated away from DOS. Then I started seeing talk of these Borland development environments for Windows and thought "I love TP, so why not give these a shot". I actually much preferred those IDE's to Visual Studio as well, but alas my career and personal interest was switching to non-Windows technologies at that point and thus I never really found a practical use for Borland's Windows compilers. A few years back I did need to throw together a basic Windows app for some clients, but by that point Delphi was dead and I'd forgotten a lot of Pascal's nuances anyway. So I ended up knocking up something in VB.NET; which was actually less painful than I remembered from the .NET 1.0 days. In fact almost pleasurable. But for all of Pascal / Delphi's warts, I did very much prefer that language over any of the iterations of Visual Basic. In fact I think I'd probably go further and say I preferred it over C/C++ as well.
therealmarv 11y ago
related: http://www.vcljs.com/ http://www.vcljs.com/ I wondered myself if a Delphi approach is existing for web pages anywhere... and found it. hehe
davidw 11y ago
Borland gets a lot of mentions in this book, which is very interesting as well as entertaining: "In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters" http://www.amazon.com/Search-Stupidity-High-Tech-Marketing-Disasters/dp/1590591046/?tag=dedasys-20 http://www.amazon.com/Search-Stupidity-High-Tech-Marketing-D... I'd highly recommend it. Technology changes, but people don't.
CamperBob2 11y ago
In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yokam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yokam replied without hesitation "Absolutely." Any day of the week! Why is this even in question?
- rytis 11y ago
  Losing one customer can either mean: a) losing $100 b) losing $1'000'000. What do you pick?
  - whyleyc 11y ago
    The inverse is also true.
    - jack9 11y ago
      The inverse is the same. Losing $1mil can either mean: a) losing 10000 customers b) losing 1 customer. What do you pick? There are more customers who can afford 100$ than 1mil. That's the important factor, not the way you want to present the numbers.
      - smitherfield 11y ago
        Not really. Small customers are sensitive to fads and trends, while enterprise customers (particularly in the field of software, as we all know!) will stick with a product well past its sell-by date as long as it "works." You have a lot more time to pivot when you start losing enterprise customers than small customers.
      - ralfd 11y ago
        I think he meant with inverse. a) winning 10000 customers b) winning 1 customer.
- babuskov 11y ago
  Never. I'm saying this from a personal experience running a B2B company for 7 years and switching to B2C model three years ago. I would never go back. Sure, having a couple of big customers looks like a more stable option at first, but when big ones hit the ground, they hit hard. The levels of stress are beyond compare. Of course, there are drawbacks and some things are different. If you aim for large market, you have to invest in marketing/PR much more - but you are allowed to care less on the customer support front. (I hope I won't be eating my words in a couple of years, but from current POV, it seems much better to have a huge base of small customers than a few big ones).
GnarfGnarf 11y ago
I loved Turbo C. I learned C from it. The manuals were beautiful, lucid and generous. Borland C++ 3.1 was head & shoulders above Programmer's Workbench. Unfortunately it fell apart at 4.5.
desireco42 11y ago
Borland was beloved company that made tools that made programming enjoyable. Answer covers all the main points, I can only be sad that they don't exist today and can make tools. Delphi with all my good will is simply not the tool I would use today even if it wasn't priced as it is.
- ak39 11y ago
  Why not? If you were to develop Windows desktop applications today, what choices do you have that compete with Delphi? (Serious question)
ergest 11y ago
It's simple, it got disrupted by free compilers and Microsoft's .NET
pgrote 11y ago
On the non-dev front, I used Quattro Pro a bunch and loved it. What I really enjoyed was their word processor, Sprint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(word_processor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(word_processor) Sprint gave complete control over all the aspects of document production. Loved it.
- raldi 11y ago
  What aspects of document production did the competition not provide control over?
sprior 11y ago
They started out making Turbo Pascal a great product that anyone could afford, but it was so much cheaper than the "professional tools" everyone else was selling that businesses wouldn't take them seriously - there had to be a catch to the cheap price. So eventually Borland suddenly decided to at least triple the price starting with one of its versions, but it didn't work, they didn't gain ground against Microsoft and they lost the hobbyist developer.
- sigzero 11y ago
  That is a good summation.
stark3 11y ago
It was a long time ago, and I can't find anything to corroborate this on internet searches, but: Didn't Borland attempt to charge for the use of a c runtime module? They attempted to profit from software developed using their c compiler. So, not only would they make money selling the compiler, but anyone that used programs written with their compiler would have to pay also. Somewhere around that time, they lost the whole c compiler market, I think.
- dwc 11y ago
  Not sure if it's the same thing you're talking about, but waaay back they did a license change for their language products that said something along the lines of anything produced with their compilers belonged to them. There was a huge outcry and pretty much right away they said "oops! our lawyers got a bit happy" and fixed it. I don't recall exactly when that was. Their Pascal was "Borland Pascal" at the time. I think that was an honest mistake, as I doubt anyone there at the time would have thought they'd get away with that.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    Around 1991 timeframe, if I recall correctly. Basically the EULA forbade the use of Borland C++ to write compilers.
chris_wot 11y ago
This is an interesting comment. I think you can actually move from the IDE space and gradually bring in features that are of interest to Enterprise customers, who then adopt your product. I'm watching Qlikview do this right now - their original product was and still is a client app for Windows. It allows any business user to pull through datasets of pretty much any source as a poor mans ETL, then it allows that user to do BI tasks in a very simple way. Where they are succeeding is that they haven't given up on this market, but are using it to drive interest from inside companies - eventually skunkworks divisions show its value to the business, which then buys the server software and licenses. It's growing pretty rapidly, and they seem to have a sustainable model. But it's driven by the individual user.
jcrites 11y ago
(My memory could be off; it was a long time ago, and I was young) I believe that I first began learning to program in Turbo C or C++ and Turbo Pascal, far before I ever encountered Microsoft development tools, except maybe VB6, or other open source ones. I was young, in high school or earlier at the time, taking a summer school "computer camp" at a local college [1]. I remember learning Visual Delhi and C++Builder, and being amazed. I think Microsoft only had VB6 at the time. Visual Delphi and C++Builder were polished, and I was super excited to build applications with them, and I did. Then VB began evolving, Microsoft released .NET. One Borland renamed themselves Inprise and seemed to disappear.(Inprise -> Enterprise?) If Borland hand't build these consumer products, I might not have gotten into programming, or as early as I did. It helped me find my scientific/intellectual/professional love and, which led to a job at Amazon I continue to practice and are very happy with today. Farewell, Borland! You did good. You helped inspire this student to learn computer science and begin his career. [1] Scripps or Harvey Mudd -- somewhere in the Claremont Colleges, in Steele Hall.
Speakeasys 11y ago
Great write up. I always wondered where they went. This was my first IDE when I took Computer Science 101 in junior college.
orionblastar 11y ago
The Borland Turbo languages where the Cat's Pajamas. Microsoft countered with the Quick languages. Borland made Turbo Pascal for Windows and with Objects and then made Delphi. Microsoft countered with Visual BASIC. Borland made Borland C++ and JBuiilder. Microsoft countered with Visual C++ and Visual J++/J# and then later Visual C#. The free IDEs and Free compiler languages ate into Borland's sales. Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ, BlueJ, Sublime Text, GNU C/C++, Apple XCode, FreePascal/Lazarus, Ruby/Ruby on Rails, Python, Code::Blocks, etc. In 2005 Microsoft introduce Visual Studio Express a free version of their development tools. Like Amiga, Borland had the superior technology, but cheaper/free alternatives undercut their sales. Mostly it was the free and open source revolution that did Borland in.
jniles 11y ago
Not having been a developer in the Borland era, the most valuable take-away for me is this statement: "On paper this may seem like a fairly minor adjustment, if you have the attitude (as Borland executive management had) that developers are a dime a dozen and any developer can be applied to any product or problem space. That may work for technical programming skills but it doesn't work for passion." Regardless of what the technical abilities of the product, it's a good reminder that a product made great by the hard work of people who believe in it should be mindful to prioritize their ambitions in product decisions. This is particularly relevant in the open source world.
mike_ivanov 11y ago
I'm wondering what LispWorks guys would say about it.
pjbrunet 11y ago
IMO it was the Internet. C and Pascal dominated till 1994, then Java books were everywhere. I loved TP5 (the manual was awesome) but dropped everything to learn Java which promised the world: write once, run everywhere and Internet applications! Woohoo. Then Perl and Javascript were on the scene. WIRED magazine! Very exciting times. Netscape Navigator Gold baby. Delphi was "Microsloth Windoze" not even on my radar.
dschiptsov 11y ago
Because it was a lousy strategy to try to beat Microsoft in its own game - creating developer tools?) Also adapting a huge codebase for each new windows cost too much.
thewhitetulip 11y ago
Pro tip: Add an ? to make the annoying quora "login" dialog disappear, www.quora.com/Diary/? even this will make it disappear, no need to add the ?share=1 thing :D
andrewstuart 11y ago
Embarcadero is still not getting it right. They know how to build great tech but are terrible marketers. Consider for example right now they sell a range of cross platform development tools. But there's no way to view a range of impressive showcase/example apps on each platform to see what can be done. So there's no strong motivation to use their tools. People evaluating new development tools want to see and be impressed by what can be done with it. That sort of thing just isn't a priority for Embarcadero.
gizi 11y ago
Borland specialized in supplying tools that assisted in building windows-only desktop GUIs which would in turn access a database sitting somewhere on a LAN. As soon as the market moved to web GUIs, and hosting on linux, they were dead.
MichaelCrawford 11y ago
It was for quite similar reasons that Live Picture failed. We had a good product with fanatically devoted users; graphic artists persisted with LP on Mac OS 9 for years after Mac OS X came into common use. The problem was that former Apple and Pepsi CEO John Sculley was a major invester. Live Picture's image editing product, also called Live Picture - was regarded as a tool by Wall Street and as Sculley told us one day, "The street does not value tools companies". So he tried to turn us into some manner of internet company so we could have a big IPO. Really the best he could come up with was that our - admittedly superior - competitor to apple's quicktime VR be used over the web for consumer product research. He actually showed us a demo that depicted a virtual convenience store shelf in which one could use the mouse to pick up a tube of toothpaste than look it over. LP original retailed for $4k but at the time it was $600. So he was going to drop a wildly popular six hundred dollar product so we could make a little coin by measuring websurfer response to animated toothpaste? The $4K to $600 pricing drop was also a serious problem. While $4K was definitely too expensive, dropping the price so abruptly alienated our early adopters. A while after I left LP, I found a Java memory leak detection tool called I think Optimize-It. And yes garbage collected languages do suffer memory leaks if you don't know what you're doing, often seriously so as when I had to configure a job to reboot a client's server because it kept running out of swap space. Optimize-It was independently developed and published at first but Borland acquired it, then sold it for quite a lot of money. While a tool like that is indeed valuable, it's a lot cheaper to just reboot your server every night at midnight. It should have sold for maybe $200 rather than the thousands of dollars that Borland charged. I am quite sad as Borland, Live Picture, Microport, Seagate and the Santa Cruz Operation once offered really good tech employment to Santa Cruz County. There are other companies there now so it's not like there is no work, but attempting to transform what really was a tools company so it would sell during the internet bubble threw well over fifty hard-working, incredibly dedicated and talented people out of work. A coworker and good friend became homeless and quite desperate. I am pleased to report he did finally find a job and so was able to pay for a place to live but when I spoke to him while he was homeless he had lost all hope of survival. Someone like him should never have been homeless.
- michaelbunny 11y ago
  Decisions by companies listed at the stock exchange have to be seen from that perspective. Software business is an asset business. Software licences are not apples. For some strange reasons some analysts do believe that a certain kind of asset is more profitable - selling licences lead to a higher turnover. That's how software is seen from the investor's perspective. Software is craftsmanship + plus 'copy' from the distribution perspective. That's why open source really provides good results. Open source is free because there is no barter involved. There is no real declining marginal utility. Every technology that was in the position to grow a reputation busts exactly the moment the last user installed a copy ... The marginal utility has to be introduced by design :). Then you get money ... because you have a price.
vbezhenar 11y ago
Delphi was very popular in post-USSR countries. But very few people bought it. Probably 90% used illegal copies. I guess most people didn't even realize it, because they bought it on CD and paid $2 for it.

381 points by networked 11y ago

Aqwis 11y ago

You could ask the same question about companies such as Novell or Sun.

melling 11y ago
Sun ignored the rise of commodity hardware. They were relying on the Internet and Wall Street bubble in the late 90's. When those both popped, a Sun took a big hit. Anyway, why does answering this help with Borland?
- asveikau 11y ago
  Sun also had an overpriced compiler, to go with the overpriced Unix running on overpriced hardware. Then it saw these replaced with free, free, and cheaper products, respectively.
  - melling 11y ago
    Sun made its money from hardware. I never worked anywhere that used Sun's compilers. It was always gcc.
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      I did. We always used the UNIX vendor compilers back when I was doing UNIX development in the .com days.
  - webreac 11y ago
    Their hardware was too expensive, but their support was too cheap. When oracle has changed the prices, it has more than double the cost of support. Sun has developped a lot of software that was given for free (AFAIK): NFS, NIS, ...
  - rodgerd 11y ago
    Sun were, in many ways, the worst of the commercial Unixes, they just had a very loud fan base insisting they were the One True Unix. Consider how long it took to get a journaling filesystem, never mind volume management!
- mindcrime 11y ago
  > Anyway, why does answering this help with Borland? It would be interesting to explore whether or not there are any commonalities in terms of what happened to Sun, Novell, Borland, etc. And if there are, it might be interesting, in turn, to ask if any of those lessons would be useful to contemporary software companies (especially startups, given the audience here at HN). I suspect that there are some common factors that could be found, but I don't have a good feel for what they are off-hand, aside from falling back on cliches or tautologies.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    The common factor would have to be that they were squeezed by both Microsoft and Linux. Sun sold "Enterprise" UNIX until Linux-on-Intel was good enough. Novell sold networking until Windows+AD was good enough (round about the launch of Vista). Borland sold IDEs until free IDEs were good enough, and also traditional client-server dev went out of fashion along with a language migration.
- huhtenberg 11y ago
  > Sun ignored the rise of commodity hardware. Sun's got nothing on SGI in that department :)
brudgers 11y ago
Or Wildcat! BBS. http://hanselminutes.com/161/bbss-and-wildcat-from-mustang-software http://hanselminutes.com/161/bbss-and-wildcat-from-mustang-s...

asveikau 11y ago

Compilers used to be something you paid money for. It took a while, but open source and I would say gcc in particular killed that. It's funny how gcc was around for a long time, but it was only in the 2000s that cash cow compilers started dying. I think that coincides a bit with Linux and OS X becoming popular for developers. For example, it wasn't until 2005 that Microsoft started providing a VS express SKU. You see Linux start to kill old school commercial Unix (like Sun) around the same time. Probably the same trend.

RogerL 11y ago
I remember in the 90s advocating for things like gcc and the absolute scorn I would receive. "A free compiler!!! What kind of crap must that be??". You paid for compilers, you paid for your version control, you paid for your bug tracker, and that was that. Interestingly, at that company (a defense contractor) it was the government more than anything that changed that attitude. There were a lot of projects initiated by the DoD designed to test whether Linux and other open software were a good choice. Attitudes slowly came around. And it (paid=good) is not an entirely unfounded position. There was some really bad OS software, and Visual Studio is still top by some measures (quality of the debugger). But the amount of pain noncompliance of the VS compiler brought was just frustrating. And if you want really fast code on x86 it still makes sense to buy the Intel compilers (C++ and Fortran).
- Retric 11y ago
  It's important to note that Visual Studio got a lot of love from MS above and beyond what it's revenues would support. Likewise Intel have gcc a lot of love because they needed to get software used to longer pipelines.
- douche 11y ago
  If the VS debugger is king of the hill, then it must be really grim out there. At least half the time, I'm using printf debugging because actually running in the debugger brings my entire machine (16 GB RAM, quad-core intel) to a standstill.

e3pi 11y ago

See Wikipedia on where Phillipe's successes have been and is doing today: a smart watch running 2 yrs per charge. His horolog tech is being pursued by at least two Swiss firms in the Jura. 'Phillipe the Phoenix` is a facile adaptor I admire.

adrianlmm 11y ago

I used Delphi for more tan 10 years, so this is what I believe it went wrong: * They lost Anders Hejlsberg * Free compilers got aceptable. * Lack of back compatibility, new VCL components from one version weren't compatible with older ones, every new versión require to biy the new components. * To expensive. * No new books to learn Delphi, they are to old. I'm still using Delphi 7 for some projects.

lbruder 11y ago
Still using D7 nearly everyday, alongside XE7 at work. The impressive, yet sad, thing is 2002's Delphi 7 still runs circles around XE7. Fast, robust, sound documentation. Even Visual Studio and IntelliJ feel weird compared to the simplicity of that old IDE. Sure, lots of parts are missing, no refactoring, no reformatting, whatever. For me it's more fun to use D7 than anything else at the moment. Bad sign.
- hibikir 11y ago
  That's not really about the IDE side of Delphi, but the compiler and runtime side of Delphi. It was an absolutely awesome product, targeting the individual developer or small team, writing a custom application. Nothing I've ever worked since compares for that. But it's limitations are the same as Ruby on Rails limitations: Wonderful at one thing, only a headache anywhere else, and as we ask developers to do other things, the tools just stop being quite so good. Looking at what we do on websites today, and how much it costs to build it, it sure feels like we've been taking steps backwards for quite a while.
yoodenvranx 11y ago
Even after not using it for 10 years I miss Delphi a lot. You could click a UI together in a very short time, add some code and you had a running standalone .exe without the need of any runtime dlls. Yes, Delphi it was limited in some ways and the language was not the best, but is was (and in my opinion still is) the best way to easily create a "simple" standalone gui applications.
- 11y ago

stared 11y ago

Answers to two (closed) Stack Exchange questions are relevant: What happened to Borland Delphi? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/83009/what-happened-to-borland-delphi http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/83009/what-ha... Why has C prevailed over Pascal? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/114846/why-has-c-prevailed-over-pascal http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/114846/why-ha...

escaped_hn 11y ago
A closed stackexchange question? Ya don't say!
- ta92929 11y ago
  And here I thought it was just the stackoverflow mods that closed everything and you were supposed to take stuff like this to stackexchange.

ape4 11y ago

Microsoft poached some people. http://www.zdnet.com/article/borland-sues-ms-over-staff-poaching/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/borland-sues-ms-over-staff-poac...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

alecco 11y ago

Not a single mention of all the dirty tricks by Microsoft?! What a shallow memory. I remember how Microsoft cornered Borland and others to use some undocumented features of their OS, then make them incompatible. Remember, back in the 90s updating software on mass scale was a PITA, end users were expected to never update. Also abusing their dominance to aggressively target key developers and contractors, copying any good application in the ecosystem and bundling it. But SV didn't learn the lesson and we are now in more abusive walled gardens for or mobile phones. And some young people parroting how wonderful Microsoft and Bill Gates are today.

nadams 11y ago
> And some young people parroting how wonderful Microsoft and Bill Gates are today. Compared to what Microsoft used to be like - recently Microsoft has made some pretty, surprising, awesome moves. Specifically their open source movement (including .Net). You would never have seen that 10-20 years ago. I'm sure if you walked into Gates's office and said "I think we should open source this" - I have a feeling he would fire you on the spot. They even now support Linux on their Azure platform - and that's not a it-will-run-but-you-are-on-your-own. Now, I'm not saying Microsoft is a saint or that I would want to work for them. But considering they didn't take action against the mono or ReactOS projects makes them ok in my book (not that they would have any real legal case - but they could drag those projects through an expensive lawsuit which would just end up with a deal to cease development).
- FrankenPC 11y ago
  I was going to say the same. The move to open source .net is brilliant. I wonder if some enterprising company will try to convert .net into asm.js so we can run it in the browsers.
  - bliti 11y ago
    What do you reason would be the benefit of doing that?

welshguy 11y ago

Eclipse.

babuskov 11y ago
Actually, what made me stop using Borland (C++ Builder) was switching to Linux (going to open source GCC and wxWidgets library) and web (Browsers and PHP getting good enough to build bigger projects in it). Borland failed to deliver usable solutions for Linux and web at the time and after I got used to new tools I simply did not bother to try anymore.

_ak 11y ago

As a former Borland employee (not for very long, 2006-2009, and actually working in their Austrian offices, which originally became part of the company through the Segue acquisition), I certainly didn't have the complete picture, but our managers, even going as far as those located in Cupertino, and later Austin, were quite open about what Borland's issue was: even with the rise of Java, they thought they could continue in the IDE business like they did before. Apparently, JBuiler used to be their #1 cash cow. Well, until Eclipse came along: within 18 months, JBuilder license sales dropped to essentially zero. They eventually realized that the whole IDE market was dead, so that was spun off into CodeGear, JBuilder was relaunched as an Eclipse distribution with "premium" extensions, and CodeGear was ultimately sold to Embarcadero, while the rest of the company was trying to refocus on producing software for other parts of the development lifecycle, from requirements management to automated testing and test management (hence Segue) to SCM. Company performance was atrocious, and that really screwed over people that took part in the employee share program, but they somehow managed to make it over to get acquired by Micro Focus.

meddlepal 11y ago
Someone should tell JetBrains the whole IDE market is dead.
- CydeWeys 11y ago
  Borland was also many times JetBrains' headcount at its peak, and even today is significantly larger. It doesn't follow that because a market supports a company of one size, it must also support a company of a much larger size.
  - adevine 11y ago
    Exactly. I also wonder whether it would even have been possible to start Jetbrains in the US. Being based in the Czech Republic gave them a much lower cost structure, and in the beginning, competing with Eclipse's free price tag meant noone could ever have supported a sizable company in the US.

avodonosov 11y ago

As good guess as any else.

protomyth 11y ago

In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yokam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yokam replied without hesitation "Absolutely." They stopped selling $49.95 compilers with IDEs and tried to be an enterprise company. People still buy IDEs and compilers. If they had kept doing what they were doing and improving their products, they would have been fine. Instead, they wanted the big money and it didn't happen.

bluedino 11y ago
They also sold $299 and $499 compilers It's weird thinking we used to pay for compilers
- protomyth 11y ago
  We still pay for text editors and IDEs. Heck, people still sell compilers. I am saying those $299 and $399 price points were mistakes.
- DCoder 11y ago
  > It's weird thinking we used to pay for compilers People still do. For example, Intel sells several compilers: https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-compilers https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-compilers

gjkood 11y ago

I have to say that Borland TurboPascal 3.0 (or earlier) was one of the finest pieces of software that I have ever seen. A full fledged Pascal compiler and a Wordstar compatible editor in a 29K binary. Where have those days gone?

FrankenPC 11y ago
The speed of the compiler! What an amazing environment. If they had continued to evolve with the tech industry they would have been gods.

troymc 11y ago

I laughed at "...building the software analogs of sewer systems, utility poles, or synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats." It derives from a Steven Wright Joke: "All of the people in my building are insane. The guy above me designs synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats. The lady across the hall tried to rob a department store... with a pricing gun... She said, "Give me all of the money in the vault, or I'm marking down everything in the store..." http://www.humournet.com/misc.humour/steven_wright.txt http://www.humournet.com/misc.humour/steven_wright.txt

revanx_ 11y ago

Borland had its moments, Delphi(RAD successor to Turbo Pascal) was a total hit with Delphi 7 being the pinacle, unfortunatelly after that all went down the hill. Later on in 2008 Embarcadero Technologies picked up Delphi and has been selling it ever since. If anyone is interested, Delphi today is on life support and exists only because it still has a strong base of followers from the Borland time. The rapid cost of development has pushed Delphi out of reach for younger generations who are not used to paying for development tools.

ads_are_shite 11y ago

The problem is IDES always end up shit. Even revered ones end up shitting the bed. Light weight development practises - a-la-vim will always win out in the long run.

bbarn 11y ago

Turbo Pascal was the first software I remember buying in a retail box. Before then it was all copied and school-given software, but something in 15 year old me really felt it was worth buying this tool. It was. That purchase spawned a career out of my evening hobby. Then, a few years later, when I was mostly using C or VB, and only firing up Pascal for fun now and then, Delphi came out. I was super excited. Until I realized I could barely use it, and none of my local book stores had anything on it that was helpful to read. By the time the internet came along, and I got into full time development.. .net was out, with "academic" pricing for VS 2003. That purchase brought me real jobs, at real companies. So, for me.. Borland got me curious, got me hooked, then I switched to tools that got me money. Maybe that's because the ecosystem had changed, but I can't be the only one.

FrankenPC 11y ago
You sound like me. 15 years old and Turbo Pascal was a mind blowing experience for me. Especially in the graphics arena. UCSD physics department hired me to convert their particle collision vector data (Monte Carlo calculations) into a 3D graphics representation. That was a hell of an experience for me.
laumars 11y ago
> By the time the internet came along, and I got into full time development.. .net was out, with "academic" pricing for VS 2003. The web was around for about decade before Microsoft .NET arrived. In fact I remember coding Delphi in an evaluation copy of the IDE given away on a cover CD from .Net magazine (not to be confused with Microsoft .NET). And then a few years later downloading a pirated copy of a beta release of Visual Studio .NET. It was actually the web that introduced me to Borland's Windows IDEs. I'd used Turbo Pascal extensively, but then got hooked on Visual Studio once I migrated away from DOS. Then I started seeing talk of these Borland development environments for Windows and thought "I love TP, so why not give these a shot". I actually much preferred those IDE's to Visual Studio as well, but alas my career and personal interest was switching to non-Windows technologies at that point and thus I never really found a practical use for Borland's Windows compilers. A few years back I did need to throw together a basic Windows app for some clients, but by that point Delphi was dead and I'd forgotten a lot of Pascal's nuances anyway. So I ended up knocking up something in VB.NET; which was actually less painful than I remembered from the .NET 1.0 days. In fact almost pleasurable. But for all of Pascal / Delphi's warts, I did very much prefer that language over any of the iterations of Visual Basic. In fact I think I'd probably go further and say I preferred it over C/C++ as well.

therealmarv 11y ago

related: http://www.vcljs.com/ http://www.vcljs.com/ I wondered myself if a Delphi approach is existing for web pages anywhere... and found it. hehe

davidw 11y ago

Borland gets a lot of mentions in this book, which is very interesting as well as entertaining: "In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters" http://www.amazon.com/Search-Stupidity-High-Tech-Marketing-Disasters/dp/1590591046/?tag=dedasys-20 http://www.amazon.com/Search-Stupidity-High-Tech-Marketing-D... I'd highly recommend it. Technology changes, but people don't.

CamperBob2 11y ago

rytis 11y ago
Losing one customer can either mean: a) losing $100 b) losing $1'000'000. What do you pick?
- whyleyc 11y ago
  The inverse is also true.
  - jack9 11y ago
    The inverse is the same. Losing $1mil can either mean: a) losing 10000 customers b) losing 1 customer. What do you pick? There are more customers who can afford 100$ than 1mil. That's the important factor, not the way you want to present the numbers.
    - smitherfield 11y ago
      Not really. Small customers are sensitive to fads and trends, while enterprise customers (particularly in the field of software, as we all know!) will stick with a product well past its sell-by date as long as it "works." You have a lot more time to pivot when you start losing enterprise customers than small customers.
    - ralfd 11y ago
      I think he meant with inverse. a) winning 10000 customers b) winning 1 customer.
babuskov 11y ago
Never. I'm saying this from a personal experience running a B2B company for 7 years and switching to B2C model three years ago. I would never go back. Sure, having a couple of big customers looks like a more stable option at first, but when big ones hit the ground, they hit hard. The levels of stress are beyond compare. Of course, there are drawbacks and some things are different. If you aim for large market, you have to invest in marketing/PR much more - but you are allowed to care less on the customer support front. (I hope I won't be eating my words in a couple of years, but from current POV, it seems much better to have a huge base of small customers than a few big ones).

GnarfGnarf 11y ago

I loved Turbo C. I learned C from it. The manuals were beautiful, lucid and generous. Borland C++ 3.1 was head & shoulders above Programmer's Workbench. Unfortunately it fell apart at 4.5.

desireco42 11y ago

Borland was beloved company that made tools that made programming enjoyable. Answer covers all the main points, I can only be sad that they don't exist today and can make tools. Delphi with all my good will is simply not the tool I would use today even if it wasn't priced as it is.

ak39 11y ago
Why not? If you were to develop Windows desktop applications today, what choices do you have that compete with Delphi? (Serious question)

ergest 11y ago

It's simple, it got disrupted by free compilers and Microsoft's .NET

pgrote 11y ago

On the non-dev front, I used Quattro Pro a bunch and loved it. What I really enjoyed was their word processor, Sprint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(word_processor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(word_processor) Sprint gave complete control over all the aspects of document production. Loved it.

raldi 11y ago
What aspects of document production did the competition not provide control over?

sprior 11y ago

They started out making Turbo Pascal a great product that anyone could afford, but it was so much cheaper than the "professional tools" everyone else was selling that businesses wouldn't take them seriously - there had to be a catch to the cheap price. So eventually Borland suddenly decided to at least triple the price starting with one of its versions, but it didn't work, they didn't gain ground against Microsoft and they lost the hobbyist developer.

sigzero 11y ago
That is a good summation.

stark3 11y ago

It was a long time ago, and I can't find anything to corroborate this on internet searches, but: Didn't Borland attempt to charge for the use of a c runtime module? They attempted to profit from software developed using their c compiler. So, not only would they make money selling the compiler, but anyone that used programs written with their compiler would have to pay also. Somewhere around that time, they lost the whole c compiler market, I think.

dwc 11y ago
Not sure if it's the same thing you're talking about, but waaay back they did a license change for their language products that said something along the lines of anything produced with their compilers belonged to them. There was a huge outcry and pretty much right away they said "oops! our lawyers got a bit happy" and fixed it. I don't recall exactly when that was. Their Pascal was "Borland Pascal" at the time. I think that was an honest mistake, as I doubt anyone there at the time would have thought they'd get away with that.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Around 1991 timeframe, if I recall correctly. Basically the EULA forbade the use of Borland C++ to write compilers.

chris_wot 11y ago

This is an interesting comment. I think you can actually move from the IDE space and gradually bring in features that are of interest to Enterprise customers, who then adopt your product. I'm watching Qlikview do this right now - their original product was and still is a client app for Windows. It allows any business user to pull through datasets of pretty much any source as a poor mans ETL, then it allows that user to do BI tasks in a very simple way. Where they are succeeding is that they haven't given up on this market, but are using it to drive interest from inside companies - eventually skunkworks divisions show its value to the business, which then buys the server software and licenses. It's growing pretty rapidly, and they seem to have a sustainable model. But it's driven by the individual user.

jcrites 11y ago

(My memory could be off; it was a long time ago, and I was young) I believe that I first began learning to program in Turbo C or C++ and Turbo Pascal, far before I ever encountered Microsoft development tools, except maybe VB6, or other open source ones. I was young, in high school or earlier at the time, taking a summer school "computer camp" at a local college [1]. I remember learning Visual Delhi and C++Builder, and being amazed. I think Microsoft only had VB6 at the time. Visual Delphi and C++Builder were polished, and I was super excited to build applications with them, and I did. Then VB began evolving, Microsoft released .NET. One Borland renamed themselves Inprise and seemed to disappear.(Inprise -> Enterprise?) If Borland hand't build these consumer products, I might not have gotten into programming, or as early as I did. It helped me find my scientific/intellectual/professional love and, which led to a job at Amazon I continue to practice and are very happy with today. Farewell, Borland! You did good. You helped inspire this student to learn computer science and begin his career. [1] Scripps or Harvey Mudd -- somewhere in the Claremont Colleges, in Steele Hall.

Speakeasys 11y ago

Great write up. I always wondered where they went. This was my first IDE when I took Computer Science 101 in junior college.

orionblastar 11y ago

The Borland Turbo languages where the Cat's Pajamas. Microsoft countered with the Quick languages. Borland made Turbo Pascal for Windows and with Objects and then made Delphi. Microsoft countered with Visual BASIC. Borland made Borland C++ and JBuiilder. Microsoft countered with Visual C++ and Visual J++/J# and then later Visual C#. The free IDEs and Free compiler languages ate into Borland's sales. Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ, BlueJ, Sublime Text, GNU C/C++, Apple XCode, FreePascal/Lazarus, Ruby/Ruby on Rails, Python, Code::Blocks, etc. In 2005 Microsoft introduce Visual Studio Express a free version of their development tools. Like Amiga, Borland had the superior technology, but cheaper/free alternatives undercut their sales. Mostly it was the free and open source revolution that did Borland in.

jniles 11y ago

Not having been a developer in the Borland era, the most valuable take-away for me is this statement: "On paper this may seem like a fairly minor adjustment, if you have the attitude (as Borland executive management had) that developers are a dime a dozen and any developer can be applied to any product or problem space. That may work for technical programming skills but it doesn't work for passion." Regardless of what the technical abilities of the product, it's a good reminder that a product made great by the hard work of people who believe in it should be mindful to prioritize their ambitions in product decisions. This is particularly relevant in the open source world.

mike_ivanov 11y ago

I'm wondering what LispWorks guys would say about it.

pjbrunet 11y ago

IMO it was the Internet. C and Pascal dominated till 1994, then Java books were everywhere. I loved TP5 (the manual was awesome) but dropped everything to learn Java which promised the world: write once, run everywhere and Internet applications! Woohoo. Then Perl and Javascript were on the scene. WIRED magazine! Very exciting times. Netscape Navigator Gold baby. Delphi was "Microsloth Windoze" not even on my radar.

dschiptsov 11y ago

Because it was a lousy strategy to try to beat Microsoft in its own game - creating developer tools?) Also adapting a huge codebase for each new windows cost too much.

thewhitetulip 11y ago

Pro tip: Add an ? to make the annoying quora "login" dialog disappear, www.quora.com/Diary/? even this will make it disappear, no need to add the ?share=1 thing :D

andrewstuart 11y ago

Embarcadero is still not getting it right. They know how to build great tech but are terrible marketers. Consider for example right now they sell a range of cross platform development tools. But there's no way to view a range of impressive showcase/example apps on each platform to see what can be done. So there's no strong motivation to use their tools. People evaluating new development tools want to see and be impressed by what can be done with it. That sort of thing just isn't a priority for Embarcadero.

gizi 11y ago

Borland specialized in supplying tools that assisted in building windows-only desktop GUIs which would in turn access a database sitting somewhere on a LAN. As soon as the market moved to web GUIs, and hosting on linux, they were dead.

MichaelCrawford 11y ago

It was for quite similar reasons that Live Picture failed. We had a good product with fanatically devoted users; graphic artists persisted with LP on Mac OS 9 for years after Mac OS X came into common use. The problem was that former Apple and Pepsi CEO John Sculley was a major invester. Live Picture's image editing product, also called Live Picture - was regarded as a tool by Wall Street and as Sculley told us one day, "The street does not value tools companies". So he tried to turn us into some manner of internet company so we could have a big IPO. Really the best he could come up with was that our - admittedly superior - competitor to apple's quicktime VR be used over the web for consumer product research. He actually showed us a demo that depicted a virtual convenience store shelf in which one could use the mouse to pick up a tube of toothpaste than look it over. LP original retailed for $4k but at the time it was $600. So he was going to drop a wildly popular six hundred dollar product so we could make a little coin by measuring websurfer response to animated toothpaste? The $4K to $600 pricing drop was also a serious problem. While $4K was definitely too expensive, dropping the price so abruptly alienated our early adopters. A while after I left LP, I found a Java memory leak detection tool called I think Optimize-It. And yes garbage collected languages do suffer memory leaks if you don't know what you're doing, often seriously so as when I had to configure a job to reboot a client's server because it kept running out of swap space. Optimize-It was independently developed and published at first but Borland acquired it, then sold it for quite a lot of money. While a tool like that is indeed valuable, it's a lot cheaper to just reboot your server every night at midnight. It should have sold for maybe $200 rather than the thousands of dollars that Borland charged. I am quite sad as Borland, Live Picture, Microport, Seagate and the Santa Cruz Operation once offered really good tech employment to Santa Cruz County. There are other companies there now so it's not like there is no work, but attempting to transform what really was a tools company so it would sell during the internet bubble threw well over fifty hard-working, incredibly dedicated and talented people out of work. A coworker and good friend became homeless and quite desperate. I am pleased to report he did finally find a job and so was able to pay for a place to live but when I spoke to him while he was homeless he had lost all hope of survival. Someone like him should never have been homeless.

michaelbunny 11y ago
Decisions by companies listed at the stock exchange have to be seen from that perspective. Software business is an asset business. Software licences are not apples. For some strange reasons some analysts do believe that a certain kind of asset is more profitable - selling licences lead to a higher turnover. That's how software is seen from the investor's perspective. Software is craftsmanship + plus 'copy' from the distribution perspective. That's why open source really provides good results. Open source is free because there is no barter involved. There is no real declining marginal utility. Every technology that was in the position to grow a reputation busts exactly the moment the last user installed a copy ... The marginal utility has to be introduced by design :). Then you get money ... because you have a price.

vbezhenar 11y ago

Delphi was very popular in post-USSR countries. But very few people bought it. Probably 90% used illegal copies. I guess most people didn't even realize it, because they bought it on CD and paid $2 for it.