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Comment by kev009 | Hacker News Reader

Some interesting trivia, Netflix' cofounder Marc Randolf spent time at Borland.

RAD Studio is kind of the closet experience to VB6 where you simply drop controls on a form and can easily wire it up.. with a much better language.

The tools were/are too expensive and Microsoft pile drove them from early dominance to niche by undercutting them handily, and it's been extractive rather than growth oriented since. There is the Lazarus/FreePascal project which offers an alternative.

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> Microsoft pile drove them from early dominance to niche by undercutting them handily

And hiring Anders Hejlsberg

Microsoft did a lot of bad things over the years, but Borland drove themselves over the cliff on their own. Instead of focusing on developer tools, they wanted to reinvent (and rename) Borland every few years in the 90s.

Bad management, bad decisions, bad products (Delphi 7 was peak). MS had nothing to do with that. And I'm sure Anders made a right move to abandon the sinking ship.

I'm still pissed at Borland for all those bad moves.

It’s very difficult to make money in developer tools. Microsoft could easily squeeze Borland by simply making MSDN tools free. Borland tried to diversify with databases, word processors, and spreadsheets, but Microsoft countered with Office, trying them altogether, and it became the default in every single business. Borland had great technology and was super innovative and I used Turbo C++ and TASM for years. But in the end, they just couldn’t find a cash cow market to keep them afloat.

> It’s very difficult to make money in developer tools.

Just to be clear: we are talking the 90s here. Everybody was charging for developer tools (). MSDN was not free, far from it. From today's viewpoint where every compiler imaginable is free and the tools are better than ever (except there is nothing like Delphi and VCL), the 90s were a heaven for tool makers.

I'm talking about the Windows ecosystem.

Correct, but Borland didn’t die in the 1990s. That was its heyday. As I said, I used Turbo C++ during that period and I spent good money on it. But the tools commoditized and Microsoft eventually made MSDN basically free in the 2000s (there might have been some nominal charge, but it was low). And that was when Borland eventually got acquired, in 2009.

The could have been the Jetbrains (before Jetbrains existed) and even bigger than Jetbrains.

I remember thinking back then that Jetbrains had their pricing right.

Not free but low enough so that invidual developers and companies wouldn't think twice about bying a license.

Borland/Inprise/Codegear/Embarcadero just priced themselves out of the market.

Just offload themselves to JetBrains, and have Delphi opened.

Open Sourcing Delphi along with Commercial licensing to Continue development is on my wish list if I ever become a billionaire.

And yes, naming themselves inprise was peak 90's wallstreet cringe.

Borland decided that they should target management instead of the developers as their focal point of product development. They ignored the Web for Delphi and decided that web development front would be covered by JBuilder, a paid and slow evolving product that could not compete against the fast iterating and free Eclipse.

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