Why did Borland fail?

http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail/answer/Danny-Thorpe?share=1&

by networked • 11 years ago

381 262 11 years ago

Aqwis• 11 years ago

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

melling2• 11 years 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?

asveikau3• 11 years 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.

mindcrime• 11 years 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.

huhtenberg• 11 years ago

Sun ignored the rise of commodity hardware.

Sun's got nothing on SGI in that department :)

brudgers• 11 years ago

Or Wildcat! BBS.

http://hanselminutes.com/161/bbss-and-wildcat-from-mustang-s...

asveikau3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

douche4• 11 years 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.

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

Compilers used to be something that nobody could afford to work on for free. Mostly because you had to start from scratch and move forward. I don't know if gcc started as an improvement in pcc or not but for its early years it was both functional and atrocious. Comparing its generated code to the Greenhills C compiler you just shook your head and wondered why would anyone ever advocate this stuff?

But the really magical thing about open source is that it never dies. And there is always someone willing to look at the code and fix a bug, or add a feature. And if you had a new architecture and no budget you could not afford the NRE charge of a big compiler company to build a code generator for you. And so it got incrementally better. Bit by bit. And the better it got, the more useful it was, and the more useful it was the more people used it, and then at some point it crossed the point where the economics of using a free compiler and dedicating some staff to fixing the problems you had made more sense than buying a compiler and waiting for the compiler company to fix bugs.

It really is a fascinating thing to consider and I expect that someone could write a very entertaining book about it at some point.

CydeWeys2• 11 years ago

It really is a fascinating thing to consider and I expect that someone could write a very entertaining book about it at some point.

Someone already did write that book, and that someone is RMS! If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend "Free Software, Free Society". And in the spirit of things, it of course available Freely: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf

(Though I do have a hardcopy which I'd never part with.)

tdicola• 11 years ago

It's funny, just yesterday I was in a thrift store and found a brand new still sealed in shrinkwrap copy of Visual C++ 2.0 (with its totally awesome C++ logo made of 3D plus signs: http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Visual-C-2-0/dp/B0016LE9FO) for $2.99! I remember when I was a teenager looking at copies of Visual C++, QuickBasic 4.5, Turbo Pascal, etc. on the shelf of CompUSA and wishing I could afford any of them so I could go beyond messing around with QBasic. Kids today have it so much better with access to great free development tools, and they don't even need to crawl text files on local BBS' to figure out how to use them anymore. :)

e3pi• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

hibikir2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

eropple• 11 years ago

I'd be interested in how that'd be better, today, than C#/WinForms (WPF is nice, but not for quick things). I only used Delphi a little, but C# and WinForms are super nice for clicky things and I don't think you'll find a machine in any sort of common use without at least .NET 2.0 on it, being at least effectively standalone.

frik6• 11 years ago

I remember Delphi and its Microsoft counterpart Visual Basic 1-6. They were the best RAD tools to develop GUI applications. Frontpage/Dreamweaver/GoLive were RAD tools for HTML3-4 and very good too.

I currently miss the rapid development tools we had 15 years ago. There is definitely a need for a HTML5 RAD tool - ideally with the combined functionality of JetBrains WebStorm and Adobes Dreamweaver.

T-A• 11 years ago

Pretty much my view too. Anyone who knew Delphi immediately went "OMG that's Delphi/VCL with C-like syntax!" when they saw C#/.NET ca ~2000. And once Microsoft started giving away VS Express for free in 2005, Borland's original market - IDEs and compilers for the masses - was well and truly dead.

It's easy to blame management for shifting focus to enterprise software, but they had to try doing something new.

codeulike• 11 years ago

Yes, until C#/.NET came out, Delphi was much nicer to work with than either VB or Java. Delphi was originally conceived as a 'VB killer' and thats exactly what it was.

http://everything2.com/title/The+History+of+Borland+Delphi

detaro• 11 years ago

Not sure about the exact timeline, but I would also say that they didn't even try to stay in the "for the masses" market. Delphi 8 and later IMHO didn't offer anything compelling, then there was this confusing new thing called Delphi.NET which was Delphi but different, ... So this space stayed on Delphi 7

coderjames• 11 years ago

Your description of C#/.NET sounds like it might get me to take another look at C# in the future.

I learned Windows programming on-the-job using Delphi and then thought I should investigate a "more common" C++ environment (I already knew console-based C++). Learning that _Visual_ C++ had no similar RAD environment was really shocking. My resource editor isn't attached to an an automatic code generator? Say what?

After that experience with Visual C++, I'd assumed Microsoft did roughly the same thing with "Visual C#" and never gave it a more than cursory look. I also had the fear that this new .NET thing would be yet another technology they hype then deprecate. What's the official Windows GUI framework this month? Is it Win32 Or maybe MFC? Or was it WPF or WinForms or some new XAML thing? (Sorry, went off on a tangent there...)

acqq• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg

"In 1996, Hejlsberg left Borland and joined Microsoft." "Since 2000, he has been the lead architect of the team developing the language C#."

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB863034062733665000

1997: "Microsoft also offered Mr. Hejlsberg a $1.5 million signing bonus, a base salary of $150,000 to $200,000 and options for 75,000 shares of Microsoft stock. After Borland's counteroffer last October, Microsoft offered another $1.5 million bonus, the complaint says."

revanx_2• 11 years ago

I remember a few books coming out lately, Coding in Delphi from Nick Hodges comes to mind if you want to look at the latest for what Delphi has to offer.

conradfr• 11 years ago

I have fond memories of Delphi 3 during my high school years.

I did a marketing internship at Borland France around 2004 and Delphi was still the cash cow but a great deal of effort was put toward "enterprise" softwares like StartTeam, Together etc that were from acquired companies IIRC.

It's easy to judge now but back then the shift toward the web apps was slowly happening, C#/.Net was not especially a success ...

patsplat• 11 years ago

I have fond memories of Turbo Basic in my dad's lab

pjmlp8• 11 years ago

C#/.Net was not especially a success ...

It was in Portugal, but the focus was in ASP.NET not WinForms.

atombender2• 11 years ago

For me (Delphi programmer until around 2001), there were several more important factors in the eventual failure of Delphi.

First, at the time Borland (or, briefly, Inprise) tried to move into the "enterprise" market, with expensive, nebulously defined "middleware" products like Midas. This is why they aggressively pursued failed tech like CORBA. It was a disaster, and had nothing to offer those who wanted to get stuff done. They also clung to BDE despite the fact that ODBC was much more mature and fast. Serious users used some ODBC components that someone built.

They forgot that Delphi was a tool to build great apps in, and didn't figure out that Delphi was great on the back end. It was all about GUI apps, but it turns out that it was incredibly productive for non-visual apps, too. With a better strategy, Delphi might have competed with Java, but they missed a lot of what made Java great in the beginning. Support for web development, even sockets, was near-non-existent.

One problem with backend apps in Delphi was that it was painful to work with C libraries. One huge thing they could have done was to make it trivial to generate C bindings, but the best they had was a rather terrible tool to convert header files to Pascal files. (I wrote a much better tool that understood macros and could even translate complex C++ headers like Microsoft's MAPI, but I'm sure Borland could have done even better.)

Delphi also tried to pursue COM (in addition to CORBA) as a distributed programming glue. Delphi 4 even had a typelib editor (which was buggy and horrible), which you needed to use to get any performance at all; the automagic "OLE Automation" support built into the language was awesome but really slow. It turns out that distributed programming with COM was not very mature, and trying to use it with Delphi was painful (though possible).

Borland also got distracted by Linux (not a good fit for a closed-source company) and by C++ (C++Builder could never be as successful as Delphi since they didn't control the language and had to extend the C++ compiler with custom directives to make it work the way Delphi did).

In the end, it's best summarized as: Lost focus, didn't realize what they had, pursued the wrong markets. Being stuck with a proprietary language didn't help, of course.

mdpopescu2• 11 years ago

I agree with everything you're saying here except for one thing: Delphi was amazing for COM programming. In fact, it took me years of reading complaints about how complicated COM programming was (and thinking everybody is nuts) before I first saw an example of COM done with C++ and realized what people meant. We were doing a ton of COM / COM+ programming in Delphi 5 and we've never had any problems.

pjmlp8• 11 years ago

Agree.

Funny thing is that now, around 20 years later we have .NET going fully AOT with .NET Native (kind of Delphi experience) and C++/CX with XAML (kind of C++ Builder experience).

giancarlostoro• 11 years ago

Sadly I always wanted to get into Delphi, but it being unaffordable (even as a student - which JetBrain and MS give me their IDE's for free...) as well as the lack of books or online documentation are a factor. I try using FreePascal with Lazarus, but Lazarus / FP still lack the proper documentation as well sadly.

Ecio783• 11 years ago

That's strange, I remember myself buying an Italian dev magazine back at the end of the 90s that included a full copy of Delphi (ok, 16bit version) with application redist rights. I think I probably paid it the equivalent of 10euro..

One thing that I liked a lot about Delphi (compared to VB for example) that there were plenty of free (sometimes with sources too) VCL components that could be downloaded and used for your own project.

jlawer• 11 years ago

Delphi was so powerful when Win32 rich clients were king. Pre 1998 the web was not a serious development target for applications for most people. Mac OS was on a pretty large downward spiral. Linux was still under the radar (and changing too rapidly for serious closed source development).

But the web started developing, OS X started to win back the crowd and Linux showed potential (I stopped doing Delphi development when I moved to a linux box).

Since then they have added a lot of the functionality to do cross development, however a lot of it was too late, and worse a lot of it is ugly. I have never found a rich client building experience as good as Delphi. I still think it is one of the best IDE / GUI Builders packages ever assembled. However when I went for a look back at in a few years ago, the price was eye watering, and unfortunately it seems if I want that style of development my best bet now is C#.

digi_owl• 11 years ago

A pet theory for why OSX and the web seems to be such friendly is that the early web was considered an extension of print (and later video/audio) media.

And as best i can tell, media production has been long held bastion of Apple.

It likely didn't hurt that OSX is deep down a BSD, and so you could switch out the L in LAMP and be on your way.

Joeri• 11 years ago

I think the biggest problem was that between delphi 7 and delphi 2010 there wasn't a version worth paying for, even if you were an enterprise shop at the core of their delphi target market. All they did was bundle components which you could have bought yourself, and tack new features on the side, while letting the core platform go basically unmaintained. After embarcadero took over, delphi releases actually improved the core again.

I don't buy the argument that the IDE market was dead. If properly managed to cater to enterprise developer's needs, delphi could have still been big. A lot of commercial software got built with delphi not because it was affordable, but because it was better than the alternatives.

stared• 11 years ago

Answers to two (closed) Stack Exchange questions are relevant:

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-ha...

escaped_hn• 11 years ago

A closed stackexchange question? Ya don't say!

ta92929• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

alecco• 11 years 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• 11 years 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).

FrankenPC4• 11 years 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.

staunch• 11 years ago

It's not as if Microsoft voluntarily got nicer. They did every dirty thing they could to dominate the PC industry and simply failed. Now they're beginning to steer their leaky ship in a better direction, good for them. For me personally, I'll never be a fan of the company that selfishly held the web back with IE for a decade because they didn't want to compete. Sic semper tyrannis!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

sfk• 11 years ago

I've said this before (and was downvoted naturally):

Microsoft's new Open Source strategy needs to be viewed with exactly the same amount of suspicion as IBM's and Oracle's.

It may just be a move to reduce their expenses, since they may get unpaid software contributions and testing (Oracle's CEO pretty much admitted this in an interview).

frozenport• 11 years ago

Reading leaked Windows source code from the 90s, you can see MS went to pains to ensure non-compliant borland code worked. See [1][2]

[2] http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/11942/2702

[1] http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795

autokad• 11 years ago

all tech companies do some shady stuff. look how apple sought to bury Adobe because Jobs felt slighted, manufacturers having to install nets to stop factory workers from committing suicide, evading hundreds of billions in paying taxes through Irish tax evasion. Stopping competitors from getting products to market through questionable patents and an army of lawyers. Uber making false calls mess with Lyft's operations. Google approaching Facebook to fix wages, bullying suppliers while suppliers took it for hopes of future business only to find Google built up their own works, and their sitting on Apple's board while secretly developing their own is questionable at best.

I would bet that the skeletons in the closets of these tech companies are far more darker then what we find out about. i guess the short point is, usually the same people who point(ed) at the evils of microsft praise other companies who have done far worse.

nchelluri• 11 years ago

This is an interesting post. It sounds believable to me.

I'd like to think that we will get to a more ethical future.

reality_czech2• 11 years ago

No, not all tech companies do illegal things. It's a false equivalence.

* Chinese manufacturers aren't really "Silicon Valley tech companies" and workers there committing suicide has more to do with Chinese culture and poor work practices than technology.

* Keeping money in Ireland is not a crime. The government set up really dumb tax laws, and companies responded rationally to them.

* Patents suck, but again, it's a government issue. The government sets up patent laws, and you have to abide by them. Some companies are more abusive about this than others, but they all have to follow the law.

* Uber making false calls was unethical, and possibly a crime. Uber does suck as a company but not all tech companies are Uber.

* Google didn't approach Facebook to fix wages. Steve Jobs did that. It was illegal and the government fined everyone involved quite a bit of money (although probably not as much as they should have).

* "Google" doesn't sit on Apple's board. Some people from Google used to sit on Apple's board. If there is a conflict of interest they are supposed to resign, and that's exactly what happened when Google started competing with Apple's iPhone.

* Google doesn't bully suppliers, Apple does that (sometimes). Google doesn't manufacture Android phones, they get other companies to do that for them. Yes, even that Nexus phones.

* Microsoft was convicted by the Department of Justice of anticompetitive practices. If I remember correctly there were felony charges. If you don't understand how seriously unethical they were in the 80s and 90s, you haven't been paying attention at all.

jeffmould• 11 years ago

"abusive walled gardens for or mobile phones"

While some of this is Apple and Android, much of the root of this problem lies in the carriers themselves, not the software makers. Carriers have a long standing history of building very high and tight walled gardens around their networks, the devices on those networks, and even the versions of software that run on those devices. It has actually gotten a ton better since the App and Play Stores have come around. By building those walled garden stores the Apple and Android have pulled a lot of the burden for developers from individual carriers to single platforms. I would much rather have to work with a single walled garden such as the App Store than have to deal with coming up with a version of software for each carrier.

dlitz3• 11 years ago

Judging by the other replies to your post, apparently HN has forgotten, too.

sigzero2• 11 years ago

I don't think dirty tricks by Microsoft was the cause. Pricing was more of it.

PhantomGremlin• 11 years ago

Elsewhere in this discussion, finally someone mentioned a very "interesting" trick: Microsoft threw an obscene amount of money at the chief architect of Delphi. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9713816

petilon• 11 years ago

Some of Borland's problems had nothing to do with Microsoft. A good example is Borland taking 6 months to rewrite Quattro in object-oriented code. They did this in the middle of a heated battle with Microsoft Excel, where both companies were releasing major new features every 6 months. As awesome as OOP is, it is not a user-visible feature. Being MIA for 6 months while engineers OOP'd the code may have cost them the battle. You can read some of this in this story (search for 'object oriented'): http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/29/business/the-executive-com...

Some of Borland's problems were indeed Microsoft's doing. OWL vs. MFC, for example. OWL was the first object-oriented library for Windows, but MFC eventually won because MFC was always first to support Windows features. OWL lagged behind because Borland did not have access to in-development versions of Windows.

Borland applications such as Quattro Pro also suffered because Borland did not have access to in-development features of Windows such as OLE 2.0, and because of Microsoft bundling productivity applications into an Office "suite".

welshguy• 11 years ago

Eclipse.

babuskov2• 11 years 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.

_ak2• 11 years 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.

voidfunc• 11 years ago

Someone should tell JetBrains the whole IDE market is dead.

_ak2• 11 years ago

I'm not saying the market is still dead, but for a company like Borland, 10 years ago there was nothing they could have done to recover from Eclipse taking over the market. Even then, IntelliJ was a relative niche product (compared to the vast ubiquity of Eclipse), and JetBrains did diversify their product portfolio to both more aspects of the development lifecycle and to more specialized needs in IDEs. Anyway, my point was that Eclipse was a game-changer that triggered great change in Borland.

jquery2• 11 years ago

A coworker introduced me to PyCharm after years of development in vim, and it has been an incredible productivity boost. It's painful to watch coworkers slowly fiddle around with text editors. I almost don't like telling people this because it's such a professional competitive advantage for me after switching. Even my coworkers using Sublime run into pain points that I don't (perhaps because they aren't installing all the plugins they should?)

CydeWeys2• 11 years 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.

crististm• 11 years ago

If professional software developers don't get to have professional IDEs for their languages, then the software quality will continue to stay at the present levels.

The mentality of "good-enough and not even that" is pervasive. When IDEs market is dead, this means the professional pride of the industry as a whole is nonexistent.

(Eclipse does not even come close to amateur level, let alone professional. Vim and emacs which you have to configure yourself to come close to a decent level of proficiency don't count either - I'm using all three)

kriro2• 11 years ago

Slightly off topic but I think they would be a great acquisition target for Google. Acquire, open source, push hard. I think there's tremendous strategic advantage in providing the goto tools for programmers. Could be well worth giving up a nice revenue stream, too. [it's similar to providing scholarships and other "early access" recruiting measures]

alcalde2• 11 years ago

JetBrains sells $99 IDEs like in the Turbo Pascal days. The current producer of Borland's Delphi, Embarcadero, sell the product for a minimum of $1000 plus a subscription is now required to get ANY bug fixes at all! Accessing a client/server database is a $500 add-on (or upgrade to the $2000 package), etc. Delphi Professional + c/s add-on plus subscription runs about $2147 the last time I checked!

Who in 2015 pays $2,147 to be able to develop software? Note that you'll need to spend even more to target mobile and there's no Linux solution yet either.

Delphi users refuse to accept it (or that mobile or web are here to stay, or that there are better VCS systems than subversion, which is the only VCS that Delphi's IDE fully supports) but the days of the expensive, proprietary IDE are indeed dead. MS releasing a free VS Community Edition was just the final nail in the coffin.

ExpiredLink2• 11 years ago

IIRC, JBuilder cost almost $500 back then. Eclipse initially wasn't better but open (for extensions) and gratis.

Shivetya• 11 years ago

pretty much was the fast release track that Delphi had and constant feels as its full price for each release. It got stupid expensive for those paying their own way while all these other options appeared at such better pricing.

The packages were structured that some really nice features were bundled with stuff many likely would never use and the upcharge to each tier wasn't small.

brianwawok3• 11 years ago

I pay approx that for Idea. So people will pay that if the product is good.

tomjen311• 11 years ago

A license for IntelliJ for a company is currently 499 euro. Admitably it still gets you much more than JBuilder would have - including support for 7 or so additional languages - but it is not even close to cheap.

If you are buying for yourself, then it is 199 euro which is less than half the price (although that doesn't include VAT).

jtwebman• 11 years ago

Maybe you guys should have tried harder, Eclipse sucks but is free, provide value and people will buy.

aurora72• 11 years ago

These days Torrent activities are extremely effective thanks to computers like Raspberry Pi and whenever an application appears which is useful but must be paid to be used, a reverse engineered and cracked version of it joins the Torrent network soon.

I think, business of software as a downloadable application is dead. See what Microsoft is doing.

laumars6• 11 years ago

You talk as if this is a recent thing that the Raspberry Pi has enabled. Yet people have been pirating software long before bit-torrent was around; and people have been using torrents, specifically, long before the Raspberry Pi's were a thing. I very much doubt the Raspberry Pi has made any significant impact on the numbers of people who torrent - let alone pirate in the wider scope of distribution mechanisms.

avodonosov• 11 years ago

As good guess as any else.

protomyth2• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

They also sold $299 and $499 compilers

It's weird thinking we used to pay for compilers

protomyth2• 11 years 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.

DCoder2• 11 years 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

gjkood• 11 years 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?

FrankenPC4• 11 years 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• 11 years 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

revanx_2• 11 years 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.

bbarn• 11 years 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.

FrankenPC4• 11 years 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.

laumars6• 11 years 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.

Ecio783• 11 years ago

Actually I remember that Delphi was way more advanced on the TCP/IP side compared to Visual Basic. I remember downloading (for free) quite complete TCP/IP VCLs that included http, ftp, icmp etc.. compared to VB that had nothing (at least for free).

pjmlp8• 11 years ago

Had used Turbo Pascal 3, 5.5. and 6 for MS-DOS, followed by Turbo C 2.0 and Turbo C++ 1.0.

Eventually I got around buying TPW 1.5 and Turbo C++ for Windows for personal use.

therealmarv• 11 years ago

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

davidw• 11 years 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-D...

I'd highly recommend it. Technology changes, but people don't.

CamperBob2• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Losing one customer can either mean: a) losing $100 b) losing $1'000'000. What do you pick?

whyleyc• 11 years ago

The inverse is also true.

babuskov2• 11 years 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).

walterbell• 11 years ago

Liquid markets have many benefits.

icelancer• 11 years ago

The myopic nature of the beast is really dumb. You want a blend of both. It's no different than managing a portfolio of assets, probably because it is identical to managing a portfolio of assets.

xorcist2• 11 years ago

It depends on who you want to be and how you want to sell your product. At the absolute top where Google and Facebook is, there's no choice, there's just a billion customers.

tomjen311• 11 years ago

Because a language, and to a lesser extend an IDE, needs an ecosystem and that is based on number of users. This is even more true today - do you think it would be easier to find a book on C# or Ada? A programmer who can code in it? Getting your questions answered on Stack Overflow?

GnarfGnarf• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

ergest• 11 years ago

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

pgrote• 11 years 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)

Sprint gave complete control over all the aspects of document production. Loved it.

raldi• 11 years ago

What aspects of document production did the competition not provide control over?

sprior• 11 years 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.

sigzero2• 11 years ago

That is a good summation.

stark3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

pjmlp8• 11 years ago

Around 1991 timeframe, if I recall correctly.

Basically the EULA forbade the use of Borland C++ to write compilers.

chris_wot• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

pjbrunet• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

MichaelCrawford4• 11 years 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.

michaelbunny2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

Why did Borland fail?

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