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

So Long...

[djbckr]

It's too bad the company went under like that, but I would have to blame the executives for making such massively bone-headed business decisions.

Anybody remember Inprise? After about a year of incredible downturn, they decided, "You know what? Maybe Borland wasn't a bad name after all"

Idiots

Delphi *was* my favorite language

Delphi was much bigger

[xquark]

I believe they sold more Delphi licenses than turbo pascal. Furthermore I think Delphi was the the impetus at Microsoft for things like the MS developing a true IDE, J++/visual J and finally C# which btw was architected by the very same guy that did Delphi.

The biggest shame was when at the end Borland tried to sell their compiler business for roughly $1b no one wanted it, eventually some veritably unknown company called Embarcadero made an offer for $24m for the business and that was the end of that.

Lesson of the day: Regardless of how good/essential the products you deliver may have been, bad management and poor future insight can make you crash and burn.

Re:Delphi was much bigger

[dedazo]

Visual Basic killed Delphi. Delphi was always a better language/runtime/platform, unfortunately it was full of Pascal.

VB had the advantage of being far more approachable from a beginners standpoint, and I think Borland underestimated two things: the market for third party components (which was *huge* with VB) and the way businesses used development platforms - to talk to databases. The first few versions of Delphi were not exactly database friendly, while VB4 was Jet/SQL Server ready out of the box through DAO (and later OLEDB/ADO). Interop with Access also didn't hurt one bit, of course... though that gave way to some of the worst departmental apps in the history of mankind.

I think the Delphi saga is yet another case of a Microsoft competitor with an arguably superior product but completely clueless as to how it should have been marketed and at whom.

Re:Delphi was much bigger

[metamatic]

Visual Basic killed Delphi. Delphi was always a better language/runtime/platform, unfortunately it was full of Pascal.

Worse than that: it was Pascal enough to annoy people used to BASIC, but not actually Pascal enough to be standard Pascal.

You are Micro Focus

[fm6]

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. Remember the Y2K crisis? That was mostly about COBOL apps.

Which isn't a defense for the continued existence of COBOL. I only disagree with your statement that it should've died off in the 80s because I think it never should have been invented, with its stupid pseudo-English syntax. But like Fortran and RPG, it's too well established to be disposed of.

Assuming that Borland still does IDEs and compilers (weren't they trying to spin off that business?) this is a really good fit. Borland's tools are really kewl, but they've never gained serious mindshare, and survive only because of a lot of diehard users. Not, strictly speaking, legacy tools, but really the same kind of marketplace.

Incidentally, I used to work for Convergent Technologies, which back in the early 80s sold a MicroFocus COBOL compiler for its 68010 UNIX boxes. This compiler was, weirdly enough, written in COBOL. Somebody once explained to me why this made sense, but I've forgotten the explanation.

Re:You are Micro Focus

[DarkOx]

Right, honestly COBOL was a success in that it was really THE FIRST highlevel language. It actually dates to the 40's with Grace Hopper in the Navy. After commercialization in the 50's it really did achieve its goals of being,

1.Resonably self documenting

2.Something non-programmers who would have been assembly jocks at the time could use

3.Write once run anywhere, programs written for 60's era IBM mainframes will run perfectly on you brand new System Z today. Its usually trivial to port programs to different hardware when your compiler vendor makes a product for the destination platform, its not terribly harder to port to another vendors COBOL in most cases.

COBOL is still a good choice for large control break processing type operations like account reconciliation in mainframe environments. Its not terribly hard to maintain, where it is hard is when where someone did tricks manipulate the normal representation of the things like dates in memory to save a few bytes. In the last 15 years people have pretty much stopped playing games and are doing it the COBOL way which does use 4 bytes in most cases to store "2009". Memory and storage are not so expensive anymore as to make this a problem.

If what you want to do is detail 500,000 telephone bills; COBOL is still a good way to go about it as there are few tools that would truly be easily understood by just anyone looking at them.

I am not saying lets all start developing complex applications in COBOL but it STILL has a place in some tasks.

Re:You are Micro Focus

[Anonymous Coward]

Well for one, you could correctly identify Ms. Hopper as a Lieutenant at the time of the event. Calling her an Ensign was a severe slap in the face of her reputation.

Secondly, her idea of using English to program computers was a new one at the time she came up with it. Her initial implementation may have not been up to the standards of modern block-control languages, but that is to be expected with an early prototype.

Thirdly, she didn't invent COBOL per se. She created a language called FLO-MATIC. COBOL was defined by committee (CODASYL) based on both Lt. Hopper's work and input from IBM. Ms. Hopper latter lead the charge to properly standardize the language, but that was long after the cat was out of the bag.

Lastly, show a bit of respect for your elders. She was a pioneer working in uncharted territories. She wasn't going to get it right straight off the bat. But her ideas did have a profound impact on the industry, and lead to the block-structured languages you are so fond of.

(Posting anonymously to prevent undoing modding in this thread. No, I wasn't the one who modded you fm6.)

P.S.: Kudos on mentioning B20s. BTOS was the Microsoft Office of its day. ;-)

Re:You are Micro Focus

[Ilgaz]

I started to wonder if people bitching about COBOL have written a single business/enterprise application serving to thousands or even millions?

I see there is a language which is designed for writing business applications and even named that way, runs on mainframes which are worth millions and serving to thousands in mission critical environments and people who didn't write a single line of code (in that sense) keep bitching about it. It is not you I talk about, it is a general thing.

In Video business, we keep seeing Audio guys using old technology like JVC SCSI hard disk recorders, sometimes analogue mixers and even pro DATs. One thing we learned is never to question them or joke about their hardware. Guy can come up with 5-6 multi hundred million Hollywood productions in his CV and can start technically and artistically explaining why he uses that DAT and that Mac G4 box running Protools old MacOS version. Of course one can ask me what that "analogue" Betacam is doing in AVID production environment at a fully digital TV studio and I can explain the reason.

You people make it look like COBOL is the pyramid scheme of all times, the people who are in charge of purchasing 100M dollar hardware doesn't know shit, COBOL programmers are evil geniuses who can convince businessman to run outdated software. That kind of thinking always makes one wonder if it is the real deal or it is simply COBOL coders doesn't care enough to hit reply button?

dBASE wasn't their downfall

[DesScorp]

Buying Ashton-Tate, maker of dBASE, was their downfall. Huge outlay and the migration to windows was a massive failure.

That wasn't their downfall. Their downfall was the same thing that made WordPerfect an also-ran, that virtually destroyed Novell, that ended Netscape, and heavily contributed to the end of Sun: Microsoft.

Love them or hate them (and at Slashdot it's usually the latter), Microsoft is single-handedly responsible for the deaths of many tech companies. In Borland's case, they simply couldn't survive against MS Visual Studio. Everything else they did or did not do pales against that fact.

Brief

[vanOorschot]

They killed of Brief ... now it is their turn to rot. not that i hold a grudge or anything ...

Re:turbo-Pascal

[Hurricane78]

and now it's You*. YouTube, YouPorn, YouEverything...

Re:Who is Micro Focus?

[julesh]

To this day, I still think OWL was far better than MFC.

Might this be because _anything_ is better than MFC?

Re:Thank God I didn't invest in Delphi

[shutdown -p now]

Almost ten years ago, in my early twenties, I asked in a forum which language to learn for relatively simple, Windows applications. I am not a professional programmer, just a hobbyist.

Most people replied that the best language for RAD was Delphi. A few said go with Java. I didn't choose any of these, I preferred Visual Basic to have the peace-of-mind of Microsoft.

Delphi died when the .NET and C# arrived, Java will probably lose its mojo now that Oracle leads the development. I don't know, we may hate Microsoft but most of the times is the last player standing.

If you've learned Delphi, you wouldn't have trouble switching to C# when that arrived. The language at 1.0 embodied many of the same design concepts (not surprising, since lead designer is the same), and the UI library (WinForms) had that definite VCL'ish smell.

And VB? I mean, that VB6 -> VB.NET migration was a major change, the languages are only vaguely similar syntactically, but semantically they're significantly different.

Anyway, 10 years ago when you asked, Delphi was definitely the right tool for that job. And part of the job of software developer is the ability to pick up new technologies as time goes on. You can't realistically expect to stay in this business for long, since languages and frameworks and approaches change quite radically every decade, and there doesn't seem to be an end to this; for example, right now we're clearly in the middle of a shift from strictly statically typed, limited strict-OO languages such as the original Java or C# 1.0, to mixed static/dynamic typing, mixed OO/functional languages such as Scala).