<story><title>Ask HN: What Happened to Borland?</title><text>I recall early in my software development career Borland have a strong hold in the developer tool space (and largely loved by developers). What happened to them? They were the “JetBrains” of their day.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>fiedzia</author><text>Several things happened at the same time:&lt;p&gt;1. At peak popularity, Borland products where easily available. Borland decided to turn to enterprise and raised the price considerably, so individuals and small companies started looking elsewhere. By the time they realised the mistake it was too late. In my opinion this was the biggest mistake.&lt;p&gt;2. Internet and Linux came, and with them Perl, PHP, Python and others. Borland missed the boat, and again by the time they realised that, it was too late.&lt;p&gt;3. Sun came with Java and Microsoft with C#, both seen as the future of enterprise, and available for free or at very low cost. Java was extremely popular at education sector, pushing out Pascal and other competitors. Both made Object Pascal obsolete.&lt;p&gt;So bad decisions and being late to the party. Also it was hard to compete with Microsoft in the long term.&lt;p&gt;As an unrelated sidenote, at the time when world was turning towards agile, they were building and marketing software for managing waterfall project management.
That just shows how disconnected from reality of their customers they were.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flyinghamster</author><text>&amp;gt; 1. At peak popularity, Borland products where easily available. Borland decided to turn to enterprise and raised the price considerably, so individuals and small companies started looking elsewhere. By the time they realised the mistake it was too late. In my opinion this was the biggest mistake.&lt;p&gt;Exactly this. Turbo C was the first real C compiler for DOS that I could afford, where &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; means that it supported large memory model. Before then, the cheap compilers were always stripped down to only allow small model (64K instructions&amp;#x2F;64K data). Turbo C was also downright fast, and it cost far less than what Microsoft wanted for their compiler. But once we actually started writing 32-bit applications, its day in the sun had already past.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What Happened to Borland?</title><text>I recall early in my software development career Borland have a strong hold in the developer tool space (and largely loved by developers). What happened to them? They were the “JetBrains” of their day.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>fiedzia</author><text>Several things happened at the same time:&lt;p&gt;1. At peak popularity, Borland products where easily available. Borland decided to turn to enterprise and raised the price considerably, so individuals and small companies started looking elsewhere. By the time they realised the mistake it was too late. In my opinion this was the biggest mistake.&lt;p&gt;2. Internet and Linux came, and with them Perl, PHP, Python and others. Borland missed the boat, and again by the time they realised that, it was too late.&lt;p&gt;3. Sun came with Java and Microsoft with C#, both seen as the future of enterprise, and available for free or at very low cost. Java was extremely popular at education sector, pushing out Pascal and other competitors. Both made Object Pascal obsolete.&lt;p&gt;So bad decisions and being late to the party. Also it was hard to compete with Microsoft in the long term.&lt;p&gt;As an unrelated sidenote, at the time when world was turning towards agile, they were building and marketing software for managing waterfall project management.
That just shows how disconnected from reality of their customers they were.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thomascgalvin</author><text>&amp;gt; At peak popularity, Borland products where easily available. Borland decided to turn to enterprise and raised the price considerably, so individuals and small companies started looking elsewhere&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; to be said for being easy to get and affordable. I gladly give IntelliJ a couple of hundred dollars a year, because $10-$20 a month for a superior developer experience is worth it to me.&lt;p&gt;If I was paying their enterprise rate, though ... not a chance.</text></comment>