Borland Being Purchased By Micro Focus

An anonymous reader tips news that Micro Focus is in the process of buying Borland Software for $75 million. They also picked up Compuware's application testing and automated software quality business. Quoting ZDNet: "The boards of both companies agreed to the deal, which is expected to complete around mid-2009. ... In 2008, Texas-based Borland made a pre-tax loss of $204m, almost four times the size of the previous year's loss. It had revenues of $172m, part of a consistent downward trend since at least 2004. ... Borland was one of the oldest software companies in the PC software business, having been founded in 1981. Its most successful era was in the late 1980s via massive sales of Sidekick, a DOS-based terminate-and-stay-resident personal productivity application, and development tool Turbo Pascal, which challenged Microsoft's dominance in the application-development market."

Comments

Who is Micro Focus?

[Tumbleweed]

"Micro Focus Net Express® is the market-leading COBOL development environment"

So, a company that should've died off in the nineties is being bought by a company that noone has ever heard of that should've died off in the eighties. Weird.

Re:Who is Micro Focus?

[NewWorldDan]

Yeah, and the second thing to cross my mind when I read the headline was "holy crap, Micro Focus is still around?"

Re:Who is Micro Focus?

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

Yes, it's rather like a newsflash that the Hanseatic league has declared war on the Duchy of Burgundy. What? Where? And who cares?
You mean it's too late to catch the 11:30 auto-gyro to the Prussian embassy in Siam?

Re:Who is Micro Focus?

[syrinx]

Believe it or not, the also push OO COBOL.

Presumably that's called ADD 1 TO COBOL?

Re:Who is Micro Focus?

[Tablizer]

providing COBOL development on the PC. COBOL programmers who were maintaining applications on a mainframe were no longer tied to an 8-color [mainframe] terminal...

Having a million-color monitor makes COBOL soooo much friendlier than 8. It's just the touch COBOL needed. I like my GO TO statements to be Sunrise Chartreuse. Any other color and they'd be mistaken for PIC statements.
           

turbo-Pascal

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Man - bring me back to the 80s - when EVERYTHING was "TURBO". Go shopping for flatware "get this new stainless steel TURBO flatware - the spoons are extra-round!". You get your fucking cable bill and it's not delivered by letter post, it's deliverred by TURBO letter post. And the computer had a TURBO button on it to make it go faster. And the cooling fan the kicked in made you think - "hey maybe there IS a turbo in there!". And you go to the deli to pick up some fish, and they're selling TURBOT, but not just ANY TURBOT, but TURBOTURBOT!!!

Man - between all that bullshit and bands like "A Flock of Haircuts" it was enough to make Max Headroom hurhurhur-HURL!

RS

Re:turbo-Pascal

[Rary]

I'm glad the "turbo" trend died. Long live "X-treme"!

Odd

[Rary]

I'm not sure what surprised me more when I read this: that Borland still exists, or that Micro Focus still exists.

Re:You are Micro Focus

[Hognoxious]

COBOL may not have much mindshare among slashdotters, but there's a lot of COBOL code out there. Most of those boring apps that do nothing but apply simple business logic, like the one that cuts your paycheck, are written in COBOL.

Do you have Tourette's syndrome, or is there some other reason why your post is liberally sprinkled with shouted obscenities?

Re:You are Micro Focus

[fm6]

Go FORTRAN yourself, you FrameMaker.