It's simple, it got disrupted by free compilers and Microsoft's .NET
Why did Borland fail?
71–80 of 269 posts
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#72As 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.
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?)
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone should tell JetBrains the whole IDE market is dead.
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 al…
What are your top 2 or 3 fav productive boosts in PyCharm? I've tried RubyMine for Ruby, and I didn't like it so I went back to Sublime.
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#74On 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.
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#75I 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.
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#.
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#76On 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.
What aspects of document production did the competition not provide control over?
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Losing one customer can either mean: a) losing $100 b) losing $1'000'000. What do you pick?
The inverse is also true.
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.
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#78As 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…
Borland helped me make trojans - it was the best!
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#79They 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.
Re: Why did Borland fail?
#80They 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 an…
That is a good summation.