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Borland Being Purchased By Micro Focus

Posted by Soulskill on from the reaching-the-bottom-of-the-hill dept.

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."

4 of 351 comments (clear)

  1. So Long... by djbckr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  2. Delphi was much bigger by xquark · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
  3. Re:Who is Micro Focus? by julesh · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    Might this be because _anything_ is better than MFC?

  4. Re:You are Micro Focus by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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. ;-)