"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.