<story><title>Why did Borland fail?</title><url>http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail/answer/Danny-Thorpe?share=1&amp;</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_ak</author><text>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&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s issue was: even with the rise of Java, they thought they could continue in the IDE business like they did before. Apparently, JBuiler used to be their #1 cash cow. Well, until Eclipse came along: within 18 months, JBuilder license sales dropped to essentially zero. They eventually realized that the whole IDE market was dead, so that was spun off into CodeGear, JBuilder was relaunched as an Eclipse distribution with &amp;quot;premium&amp;quot; extensions, and CodeGear was ultimately sold to Embarcadero, while the rest of the company was trying to refocus on producing software for other parts of the development lifecycle, from requirements management to automated testing and test management (hence Segue) to SCM. Company performance was atrocious, and that really screwed over people that took part in the employee share program, but they somehow managed to make it over to get acquired by Micro Focus.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>voidfunc</author><text>Someone should tell JetBrains the whole IDE market is dead.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why did Borland fail?</title><url>http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail/answer/Danny-Thorpe?share=1&amp;</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_ak</author><text>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&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s issue was: even with the rise of Java, they thought they could continue in the IDE business like they did before. Apparently, JBuiler used to be their #1 cash cow. Well, until Eclipse came along: within 18 months, JBuilder license sales dropped to essentially zero. They eventually realized that the whole IDE market was dead, so that was spun off into CodeGear, JBuilder was relaunched as an Eclipse distribution with &amp;quot;premium&amp;quot; extensions, and CodeGear was ultimately sold to Embarcadero, while the rest of the company was trying to refocus on producing software for other parts of the development lifecycle, from requirements management to automated testing and test management (hence Segue) to SCM. Company performance was atrocious, and that really screwed over people that took part in the employee share program, but they somehow managed to make it over to get acquired by Micro Focus.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ExpiredLink</author><text>IIRC, JBuilder cost almost $500	back then. Eclipse initially wasn&amp;#x27;t better but open (for extensions) and gratis.</text></comment>