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

101–110 of 269 posts

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#101

Post by chris_wot »

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.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#102

Post by NhanH »

mikerichards wrote: post #100
jquery wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's almost professional negligence. I had the same situation 15+ years ago when Eclipse was coming out and Java was on the rise. We really didn't know Java all that well and so Eclipse's auto-completion and doc popups were a godsend. The guy sitting there with Vi(m) was bogging down beyond belief. It got to the point, where we had to sit him down and tell him he needs to use the right tool for the job or get lost. I…

Emacs + slime for Common lisp and tuareg mode for ocaml can do everything that my intellij can do in Java. Then I can extend Emacs to cast a spell, hex vim users and spam HN every time I fixed a bug -- even with plug-ins system I suspect intellij isn't that extensible.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#103

Post by patsplat »

conradfr wrote: post #44
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.

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 ...

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

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#104

Post by protomyth »

bluedino wrote: post #65
protomyth wrote: post #19

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…

They also sold $299 and $499 compilers It's weird thinking we used to pay for compilers

We still pay for text editors and IDEs. Heck, people still sell compilers. I am saying those $299 and $399 price points were mistakes.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#105

Post by jcrites »

(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.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#106

Post by malyk »

thejosh wrote: post #91
_d8fd wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm just curious those using Sublime how they debug their programs?

Ruby web dev here...I pretty much use liberal puts statements (actually the awesome_print) gem. It's never really been a problem for me with ruby. 2001-2007 I was primarily a Java developer and the debugger was essential. But since switching to ruby in 2007 I've just never felt the need. I think it's probably the cycle time...we were using BEA weblogic as our Java server and cycle times weren't quick so you didn't want to waste time and needed to be able to step through the code. With ruby/rails it's almost instant to see your logging so I've never even looked into how to use a debugger in ruby.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#107

Post by mikerichards »

mikerichards wrote: post #100
jquery wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's almost professional negligence. I had the same situation 15+ years ago when Eclipse was coming out and Java was on the rise. We really didn't know Java all that well and so Eclipse's auto-completion and doc popups were a godsend. The guy sitting there with Vi(m) was bogging down beyond belief. It got to the point, where we had to sit him down and tell him he needs to use the right tool for the job or get lost. I…

to Nhanh.

Emacs, Slime and Common Lisp is something that I would give an exception to. The major productivity I give to that combo is the ability to change the code on the fly while debugging, especially Common Lisp's continue from exception mechanism.

Smalltalk environments have had this ability forever. I just imagine how much more productive I could be if in Visual Studio I could edit-n-continue on everything...even if my code wasn't in a successful compilation state.

Java has this and Jrebel has this on steroids, but I want to be able to edit-n-continue even if my compilation state is broken. Just throw an exception when it fails because of bad state.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#108

Post by ollysb »

thejosh wrote: post #91
_d8fd wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm just curious those using Sublime how they debug their programs?

Another ruby dev, back in my java days I used debuggers from jbuilder and eclipse. I now use pry and much prefer it as an experience. I found having everything at your fingertips rather than scattered around a gui far more efficient.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#109

Post by duaneb »

mikerichards wrote: post #100
jquery wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's almost professional negligence. I had the same situation 15+ years ago when Eclipse was coming out and Java was on the rise. We really didn't know Java all that well and so Eclipse's auto-completion and doc popups were a godsend. The guy sitting there with Vi(m) was bogging down beyond belief. It got to the point, where we had to sit him down and tell him he needs to use the right tool for the job or get lost. I…

> It's amazing that in 2015 we have people that use Emacs, Vim, or other editors that don't have intelligent, realtime code analysis and we consider that "hardcore, programmer machismo".

I think it's mostly that the current state of "intelligent, realtime code analysis" is so terrible that it can be replaced with "rename" and "find references of". I.e. ctags.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#110

Post by adevine »

CydeWeys wrote: post #95
voidfunc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone should tell JetBrains the whole IDE market is dead.

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.

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.
Post reply on HN