Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why did Borland fail?

quora.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 269 posts

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#21

Post by lbruder »

adrianlmm wrote: post #10

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.

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.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#22

Post by gjkood »

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?

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#23

Post by webreac »

asveikau wrote: post #5
melling wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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, ...

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#25

Post by frozenport »

alecco wrote: post #14

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 g…

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

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#26

Post by pjc50 »

mindcrime wrote: post #9
melling wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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…

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.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#27

Post by yoodenvranx »

adrianlmm wrote: post #10

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.

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.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#28

Post by T-A »

adrianlmm wrote: post #10

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.

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.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#29

Post by voidfunc »

_ak wrote: post #16

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 conti…

Someone should tell JetBrains the whole IDE market is dead.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#30

Post by troymc »

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

Post reply on HN