51–60 of 269 posts
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?
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."
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…
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 of Visual Studio .NET.
It was actually the web that introduced me to Borland's Windows IDEs. I'd used Turbo Pascal extensively, but then got hooked on Visual Studio once I migrated away from DOS. Then I started seeing talk of these Borland development environments for Windows and thought "I love TP, so why not give these a shot". I actually much preferred those IDE's to Visual Studio as well, but alas my career and personal interest was switching to non-Windows technologies at that point and thus I never really found a practical use for Borland's Windows compilers.
A few years back I did need to throw together a basic Windows app for some clients, but by that point Delphi was dead and I'd forgotten a lot of Pascal's nuances anyway. So I ended up knocking up something in VB.NET; which was actually less painful than I remembered from the .NET 1.0 days. In fact almost pleasurable. But for all of Pascal / Delphi's warts, I did very much prefer that language over any of the iterations of Visual Basic. In fact I think I'd probably go further and say I preferred it over C/C++ as well.
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…
While some of this is Apple and Android, much of the root of this problem lies in the carriers themselves, not the software makers. Carriers have a long standing history of building very high and tight walled gardens around their networks, the devices on those networks, and even the versions of software that run on those devices. It has actually gotten a ton better since the App and Play Stores have come around. By building those walled garden stores the Apple and Android have pulled a lot of the burden for developers from individual carriers to single platforms. I would much rather have to work with a single walled garden such as the App Store than have to deal with coming up with a version of software for each carrier.
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?
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…
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.
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.
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 stuff done. They also clung to BDE despite the fact that ODBC was much more mature and fast. Serious users used some ODBC components that someone built.
They forgot that Delphi was a tool to build great apps in, and didn't figure out that Delphi was great on the back end. It was all about GUI apps, but it turns out that it was incredibly productive for non-visual apps, too. With a better strategy, Delphi might have competed with Java, but they missed a lot of what made Java great in the beginning. Support for web development, even sockets, was near-non-existent.
One problem with backend apps in Delphi was that it was painful to work with C libraries. One huge thing they could have done was to make it trivial to generate C bindings, but the best they had was a rather terrible tool to convert header files to Pascal files. (I wrote a much better tool that understood macros and could even translate complex C++ headers like Microsoft's MAPI, but I'm sure Borland could have done even better.)
Delphi also tried to pursue COM (in addition to CORBA) as a distributed programming glue. Delphi 4 even had a typelib editor (which was buggy and horrible), which you needed to use to get any performance at all; the automagic "OLE Automation" support built into the language was awesome but really slow. It turns out that distributed programming with COM was not very mature, and trying to use it with Delphi was painful (though possible).
Borland also got distracted by Linux (not a good fit for a closed-source company) and by C++ (C++Builder could never be as successful as Delphi since they didn't control the language and had to extend the C++ compiler with custom directives to make it work the way Delphi did).
In the end, it's best summarized as: Lost focus, didn't realize what they had, pursued the wrong markets. Being stuck with a proprietary language didn't help, of course.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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…