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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

+1 for OWL. It was my first "real" C++ framework, and it was a great way to start.

Borland had a nice tool suite but somehow just couldn't hang on to market share.

I loved Borland's tools. But they got Microsofted just like dozens of other apps, one by one over the years (word proc, spreadsheet, browser, etc.)

At the time, the battle over products like Quattro were with competitors like Lotus, and not MS.

And Borland sure did their part. There were a number of great products they acquired and then destroyed. The Brief editor is a near and dear example for us developers, but they also went out of their way, it seems, to destroy dBase and the whole Ashton Tate thing. And Sidekick was a really cool app that they managed not to handle well, too.

I think dBase screwed up before they were acquired by Borland.

"Somehow?" Microsoft did its best, including hiring away Anders Hejlsberg.

Borland got rid of Anders, he was constantly criticizing the move away from dev tools to enterprise platforms.

I followed only from afar, I don't have any inside info. If you know more details than this, please tell:

"Borland Charges Microsoft Stole Away Its Employees" (1997)

http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB863034062733665000

"According to the suit, 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."

I believed MSFT offered a lot, Hejlsberg told that to Borland, Borland offered him to stay and MSFT then offered 1.5 mil more, which Borland passed.

By the way, I didn't like much OWL. The transition between OWL 1 and OWL 2 was a mess, if I remember they were practically incompatible (and also if I remember correctly, only the name was the same, I believe different companies made 1 and 2 (!) independently) whereas it was easier to upgrade the code that depended on one MFC version to the next. I liked VCL from Delphi, then also accessible from C++ Builder, but VCL lacked Unicode for too long.

At the time of Delphi 2, VCL was very nice. Delphi 2 was really, really nice way to make native Windows applications rapidly.

I don't have any inside info, but the common perception in the industry at the time was that Microsoft raided Borland's talent, and thereafter Microsoft's development tools started getting better. Borland at the time was easily the most innovative programming tools company. They had "Visual" tools long before Microsoft, so it's not surprising that Redmond focused their wallet on disrupting that narrative.

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