Microsoft to Buy Rational and/or Borland?

oblivious writes "I got this in e-mail this evening: According to a Reuters report that crossed the wires late today, the speculation is that Microsoft will make bids to buy both Rational and Borland. Shares of both Rational and Borland are up on the news, and so far both IBM and Microsoft have no comment on this report." We recently ran a story about IBMs planned purchase of Rational. Chris didn't make clear in here - it's not that Microsoft might buy both, but that Borland might be a likely target, if a bid to buy Rational out from under IBM fails, which it is likely too. Rational and IBM have signed the substantive portion of the agreement already, so any sort of counter bid would have some fun legal consequences for all involved.

Comments

HOLY HELL!

[gralem]

Nothing would be worse than M$ buying borland. It would be the end of JBuilder--a fantastic java IDE. Not to mention delphi and KYLIX! This would be B*A*D.

---gralem

Re:HOLY HELL!

[ackthpt]

Nothing would be worse than M$ buying borland. It would be the end of JBuilder--a fantastic java IDE. Not to mention delphi and KYLIX! This would be B*A*D.

I sure hope there's some sort of public comment allowed to the FTC on such a move, because this could, as you point out, clearly be viewed as quashing competition. As JBuilder is a excellent Java development tool, and we all know by now about how Microsoft wants to kill or cripple Java. Further, JBuilder is expanded and repackaged by Oracle, a chief DB rival of Microsoft. I'm sure if I spent the afternoon I could come up with many other reasons this is anti-competitive and in dire need of a letter stating so.

Re:HOLY HELL!

[tomhudson]

I used to be one of Borland's biggest fans, back when Philippe Kahn ran the show. Since his resignation on November 24th, 1995, Borland products have not been, IMHO, all that great.

Let them be bought out; let them discontinue all the competing products ... at this point, all it will do is drive people to learn more about open-source alternatives, anyway. And maybe Philippe will want to rejoin the fray. This could only be a good thing.

Mind you, there may be anti-trust concerns w. M$ buying out Borland, since Borland is their biggest competitor in the computer languages market (Borland at one time had 2/3 of ALL the language market for the PC, with everyone else splitting the difference).

Anyway, I stopped using Borland products after Delphi 3 (the newer ones didn't offer that much more, and splitting the line-up into so many different versions of the same product - Professional, Enterprise, Desktop, etc., just pissed me off). This was a far cry from the original Borland marketing philosophy: Great product, great price. I really miss the days of Turbo C / Borland C++

Re:HOLY HELL!

[yog]

Microsoft is trying to replace Java with C#, its own, "improved" version. They are not going to buy Borland for several billion dollars just to prop up a "legacy" language like Java. If they wanted to do that, why not just release new versions of the old Visual J++? This would cost them a few millions and to hell with Borland.

No, Microsoft is doing this for one simple reason: to get rid of a Java powerhouse. Just as they did with Foxpro, which they bought and pretended to maintain for a few years while pushing their own products Access and Sql Server, they're going to shelve Borland and Togethersoft too. Why shouldn't they? They've got about $50 billion in cash, nothing to spend it on, and Java continues to annoy them. It's a logical move.

Re:HOLY HELL!

[uradu]

> There's no real reason why it couldn't now be implemented as a multiple-inheritance class
> structure. The reason for single-class inheritance is historical.

I don't know where you're getting your facts. Object Pascal was never intended as a multiple-inheritance language, it had nothing to do with Borland being unable to implement MI. Borland's C++ compiler did MI capably long before Delphi came about. Delphi's single inheritance is a school-of-thought thing. Heijlsberg designed Delphi and the VCL to be THE end product, not a transition product on the way to the REAL C++ product. He was always a Pascal guy, ever since he created TP 1. They only reused the VCL in C++ Builder because it already existed and took less work than rewriting it from scratch and using a different inheritance model.

> However, with the advent of server-centric apps, there's not much need for "visual components",

Well, we definitely have different points of view on that. I don't think the browser will become THE platform anytime soon, at least not with current technologies. Relatively few types of applications can be expressed well in a stateless Form paradigm with the bulk of the code executing remotely. A rich user experience will ALWAYS require either lots of client-side code and components, or a very fat pipe to do X-type remoting. "Thin client" computing (as if!) looks good on paper and management loves it for all the obvious reasons, but it will never completely replace client side apps. Some things will always make more sense in a browser and others on the desktop.

Besides, even for server side programming the component approach is gaining hold. Just look at Microsoft's ASP.NET and Borland's web components. Face it, intermingled HTML-and-script programming is a major kludge and in no way the wave of the future. The web didn't all of a sudden make proven concepts such as separation of interface and logic obsolete. It's just that the technologies were still in their infancy and were often driven by neophytes that knew Perl and HTML and thought they ruled the world.

Re:Hate to say it but..

[Lxy]

successful? How? Borland C++ Builder, Delphi, and Kylix GONE. I don't call that successful. I call that anti-competitive.

There goes open source developement tools

[Hellkitten]

MS buys Borland: Bye bye kylix

MS buys Rational: Sue any open source that provides anything similar to rational products, or uses anything rational may have patented

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Not according to Slashdot

[blancolioni]

Pick your prophecy people: If you claim in one post that Microsoft is doomed, then you must forever disagree with any claims that they are a monopoly.

Slashdot is not monolithic!

Sigh.

Retarded, irritating and whiney -- sure. You've proved that by combining a false dichotomy with a big flaming strawman. Cheers.

So how long before...

[mengel]

... Rational software only runs on Windows?

This is the pattern that Microsoft and Intel both have repeatedly run through:

• find a company whose software helps you develop software, or web pages, or what have you
• buy that company
• make future relaeases that only work on Windows

as the software rot makes the old versions fail, users of that software are herded towards Windows.

Who need Borland or Rational?

[g4dget]

There are free IDEs (Eclipse, Forte), and there are free UML tools (ArgoUML, probably others). If they aren't good enough yet, they will improve further. And the only good product Rational has ever had, Purify, has a better open source equivalent already.

Microsoft's old strategy of killing competitors by buying them doesn't work with open source. Sorry, Bill.

Re:In other news...

[Alsee]

Microsoft today acquired the Free Software Foundation, acquiring the GPL and the last vestiges of competition.

I was about to say that it wouldn't do Microsoft any good because they still wouldn't really be able to use any GPL code, then I realized something...

quite a bit of GPL code has an "or any future version of the GPL" clause. If Microsoft DID aquire FSF it could simply release a new version of the GPL and effectively remove all protection on all of that software.

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Re:C++ Builder

[GeckoFood]

The real loss will not be C++Builder. The true loss will be Kylix.

While C++Builder is a reasonable approach to C++ development, you need to consider the quality of what it generates. In my experience, the executables that C++Builder generates are very large and very slow to execute. Being a fan of Delphi, I expected fairly small and fast executables when I purchased C++Builder, but there is a definite difference between the runtimes and the resulting executable code.

If you compare the floating point code generated between Delphi and C++Builder, there is an immense difference. The Pascal code generates much faster executables -- and that ought not to be! However, this is the case for Borland's C++ product line and it has been this way for over 10 years.

Practically every other C++ compiler out there generates tighter code than Borland's, especially in the area of floating point math. I am no fan of M$, and never have been, but I must say that their binary code is tighter, by quite a margin, than Borland's. If they acquire Borland and kill off C++Builder, they will be killing off a great GUI front end with a miserable code generator. Yes, I know Borland's is more ANSI compliant...so what? If the binary is slow, and you care about run times, ANSI compatibility is not your primary concern.

Where we will lose as developers will be in the loss of Kylix. It might not be perfect, and it might not be the most efficient code creation engine, but if it creates projects that can be ported to Linux, M$ will want to kill that off quick! And I can't say that I blame them (even if I disagree with the idea).

Re:Not according to Slashdot

[Alsee]

A) Different people can have different oppinions.

B) Either one could be wrong. How the hell does that mean people can't still assert the other one?

C) They could BOTH be right. It's completely possible for Microsoft to be an EvilMonopoly and on the verge of collapse in one or more markets. Assuming they ARE and EvilMonopoly, anything short of total bankruptcy could still require government intervention to set things right.

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