related: http://www.vcljs.com/ I wondered myself if a Delphi approach is existing for web pages anywhere... and found it. hehe
Why did Borland fail?
41–50 of 269 posts
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#42As 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…
Maybe you guys should have tried harder, Eclipse sucks but is free, provide value and people will buy.
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#43Borland 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.
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#44I 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.
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 ...
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#45Not 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…
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.
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#46As 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…
IIRC, JBuilder cost almost $500 back then. Eclipse initially wasn't better but open (for extensions) and gratis.
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.
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#47I 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.
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
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#48Not 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…
> 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…
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.
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#49As 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…
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.
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#50Turbo 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 r…
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.