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May 07 Old Borland is no moreThe last remnants of Borland, the once proud supplier of development tools, is no more. The company that calls itself Borland today sold “CodeGear”, its division created to steward the “IDE tools”, for a mere US$23 million to Embarcadero Technologies (http://www.embarcadero.com/). Embarcadero is 60 million dollar/year private company that sells database tools. Borland shares dropped about 10% on the news.
See the news at http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9937966-7.html?tag=bl.
Borland started its life to sell Turbo Pascal, a product created by Anders Hejlsberg in Denmark in order to compete with the BASIC interpreters developed by Paul Allen and Bill Gates, founders of Microsoft. Turbo Pascal was the first compiler with an integrated editor; it is the grandfather of the IDEs we see today like Visual Studio and Eclipse. Borland then went on to develop “Turbo C”, a C-language based IDE and then the professional “Borland C++” that, at the dawn of Windows, outsold Microsoft’s own C/C++ product 2 to 1. Borland C++ 3.1 was a mature Windows-based IDE with debugger and profiler. Microsoft’s competing offer, C 6.0 and C/C++ 7.0 were old-style command line tools. C++ 7.0 was a total disgrace; it crashed compiling the simplest of programs. It was not until Visual C++ and the stagnation of Borland’s offer that Microsoft became a leader again in the compiler arena.
Microsoft came up with Visual Basic in the early 90s and Borland answered with Delphi, a Pascal-based RAD tool for Windows. Delphi was (and still is) hugely popular in Brazil and as far as I know in several European countries as well. Anders Hejlsberg was behind Delphi too. After Anders and many more people left Borland around 1997 the company never really came up with an innovative development tool, although there were many attempts, especially with JBuilder, its Java-based tool.
While the tools division always did well until late 90s, the rest of the company floundered. I heard in person from the mouth of Philippe Kahn, the company’s founder, that the acquisition of Ashton-Tate (the dBase company) in 1989 was a big mistake they never recovered from. Other big mistakes followed, like renaming the company to “Inprise” and later back to “Borland”, thanks to some incompetent people hired from Apple after Steve Jobs fired them when he got his old job back.
Yes, there’s a company that calls itself Borland but the only thing it has in common with the Borland of Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Delphi fame is its name. Even its headquarters that used to be in Scotts Valley, California are now in Austin, Texas. Given its financial situation and the deep dive its stock took– now it’s worth 25% of what it did one year ago – even that may not last long.
Pretty much everybody that worked for the “old” Borland is now a Microsoft employee. Given the clear Delphi roots in the .NET Framework – Anders is the “father” of C#, I use to say that “Borland still lives…inside Microsoft”.
If you want to know more about Borland and the origins of Turbo Pascal, read this interview I did with Anders Hejlsberg in 2001: http://maurosjungle.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!F3CEB0849B03B6CC!270.entry. Comments (7)
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