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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.
If this is true, they've obviously decided to really flip the bird to the courts...
Sheesh! This is getting way out of hand, and the government really needs to step in and do something.
Micro$oft has been on a buying spree recently. Rareware was one of its more recent aquisitions, much to my horror. They had good games; now, I'll avoid them on general principle.
M$ is trying to expand by assimilation. Don't have the tools/knowledge/brains/experience to corner a market? Just buy someone who does! If they don't sell, drive them out of business!
This chain will only end with complete Microsoft control of the world- literally- or M$ gets broken up. The government has to step in and cause the second.
Microsoft's "Buy Or Kill" strategy is, unfortunately, an effective one. Destroy all competition, by taking what they have, if possible; expand to new markets by buying the leader of the industry.
End result? A Microsoft monopoly on almost every technological market.
*whimper*
Warning: Poster of this comment is a nerd. Just like everybody else here.
Well Borland is profitable:
roughly 5m/quarter for the past 4...
That's 8% net profit margin - now this isn't
Microsoft level profits but it's probably
ethically obtained!
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
I am a Java programmer myself (laugh it up), but Swing just plain annoys me.
Are you on drug(s)?!! Why not?
It also gives MS a chance to hurt Linux, which Borland has been supporting in recent years with JDeveloper and Kylix.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
"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++"
The original Borland marketing philosophy was to sell Turbo Pascal for $39.95 when everybody else was selling compilers for $500 or more.
I agree, they started getting into trouble when they decided they could sell Delphi or Java tools for $5k and abandoned their early philosophy of low-priced quality tools for everyone. Their new strategy seems to be "How much are people willing to pay to not use Microsoft?"
From the article in respect to M$ rumored bid - "That pushed the stock up, indicating that investors are betting there could be some sort of bidding war for the company, the traders said."
M$ doesn't care to own either of the companies. I belive they're driving up the cost of the Rational acquisition for IBM by floating rumors that they're goign to jump into the mix. The Boreland rumor adds some credibility to the rumor of a M$ bid for Rational because it looks like M$ has a backup plan. In reality they'll drive the price of Rational up, let IBM pay big bucks for it, and then announce or leak that Boreland just wasn't worth acquiring thereby devaluing the Boreland stock.
And yes... I do believe that the Unmarked Black Helicopters run Palladium.
"After all its the UML modelling software that MS wants, and if the IBM purchase of Rational goes through then MS has no modeller for their developers."
.NET tools, etc.
MS is setting up Visio as their UML modelling tool. We've found it to be more stable than Rose, even if it has fewer features. I wouldn't worry about that.
I was questioning why MS would want Borland at all, and then I see that Borland recently bought Starbase.
Starbase makes a reasonably decent SCM called StarTeam, and a Requirements Management piece called CaliberRM. Those are two areas that Microsoft needs some help in.
But I still don't see it, I think Microsoft's best interests are served with a partnership with Borland... so they remain as a competitor. Borland has committed to
Although I wish Borland would stay a scrappy independent forever, I always thought that Sun or Oracle would be a good parent for Borland.
Actually, if you could get past the CEO egos, a combined Sun/Oracle/Borland could be an instant IBM and Microsoft "killer". They would have the hardware from desktop on up that could be supplemented with x86 hardware, the enterprise backend software (J2EE, Oracle, etc), some of the best development tools around (Delpi/Kylix for Linux/Solaris, JBuilder, CBuilder, etc), and an Office suite to boot.
Their corporate cultures seem to be compatible, from what I know of them (not much, directly, but based on years of reading). I don't see anything compatible between Microsoft and Borland, however.
Um, two words: Visual J#
.Net common language infrastructure. Looks like Java, smells like Java - but it's 'I can't believe it's not Java'.
They essentially did resurrect Visual J++ by morphing Java to work with the
Microsoft is afraid of losing their visual modeling partner. The bad part is that Borland's new modeling solution TogetherJ doesn't support the Microsoft platform. Rational's XDE does. If IBM gets Rational, Microsoft loses it's status with Rational as a first class platform, and Borland would be something of a consolation prize. I doubt that Microsoft would want to buy Borland because it would probably take less development resources to make Visio into a decent UML modeling tool than it would to make Together support their platform. Also, if I'm not mistaken TogetherJ is written in Java, a cardinal MS no-no.
That is strange. Not sure how yours was setup, but if you checked files out for developing, it was irrelevant to the ability to backup the VSS database - same with being logged in.
Correct, but I forgot that we always ran ANALYZE.EXE before backups, causing the backups to "fail", which is what I should have said...
www.christopherlewis.com
Indeed, but what makes Delphi so unique and special isn't so much the IDE (though the IDE is excellent), it's the compiler.
Delphi is fast. I mean, really fast. No other compiler comes close. To put things in perspective, when Borland first added multiple error reporting to the compiler (ie one compile would report more than one error) I didn't understand why they did it. I hadn't seen javac at that point. I didn't understand, because it was actually faster for me to press Ctrl-f9 to trigger a recompile in order to move to the next error, than it was to move my hands from the keyboard to the mouse and back again.
Their compiler is that fast. It can do a project with over 100,000 lines of code I have sitting here in less than 8 seconds. The resultant binaries are tight. When I tried my first C++ program, I was astonished at how long it took to compile as it read in all the headers etc. I was sure I must have done something wrong.
Part of the reason it's so fast is just long history, Borland have had a lot of time to optimize it, but the other was the language design. Object Pascal is designed for fast compiles. For instance, it doesn't use headers, but each compiled unit (.dcu -> .o) included header information with it, meaning it's insanely fast to link them together. It also has excellent remake logic, if you only touched one file, only one file was recompiled. There is no [preprocessor, so the compiler can be single pass.