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Why did Borland fail?

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Re: Why did Borland fail?

#121

Post by RockyMcNuts »

wampus wrote: post #92
staunch wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/Embra…

What you don't understand is that Bill Gates is from the future. I don't wanna talk about time travel shit. Cause if we start talking about it, then we're gonna be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws. It doesn't matter. The point is, Gates grew up in a dystopian world and traveled back in time to divert money from the assholes that created it towards charitable enterprises to fix the parts of h…

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

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

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#122

Post by icelancer »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #52

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?

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.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#123

Post by Slothrop99 »

digi_owl wrote: post #83
jlawer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Certainly media companies have always worked on Macs, but the platform was actually quite bad for web development in the early days. The colors were wrong, the fonts were wrong, the entire scaling was wrong. Mac users had a defective version of Netscape and a uniquely defective version of IE.

It wasn't until Mac browsers adopted "standards" which matched the Windows way of doing things (96dpi, sRGB, MS fonts) that the Mac was really a viable web development platform.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#124

Post by mdpopescu »

atombender wrote: post #58
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.

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 stuf…

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.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#125

Post by acqq »

T-A wrote: post #28
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.

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."

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#126

Post by Ecio78 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #64
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.

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.

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.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#127

Post by Ecio78 »

laumars wrote: post #54
bbarn wrote: post #39

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 r…

> 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…

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).

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#128

Post by srj »

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…

I guess I can't tell if this post is a troll or not. :)

Someone not getting their job done is a problem. Someone using vim as their editor is not. I could understand giving that feedback ("try an IDE") but telling them their job is contingent on it is probably missing the point.

Most of the people I work with seem to use vim/emacs, and it doesn't appear to be for "machismo" reasons. It's likely just what they're used to.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#129

Post by EugeneOZ »

_d8fd wrote: post #73
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…

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.

Not PyCharm user, but IntelliJ IDEA, PhpStorm and WebStorm - they are from one family.

Most important things are:

1) Static errors analyzing. Saves a lot of time. Really, hundreds hours of time.

2) Code completion (VS users call it "IntelliSense").

3) Refactoring tools. You can change name of method in one place and IDE will change all usages of this method everywhere in code. It's extremely important.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#130

Post by jniles »

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.

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