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?

[robkill]

Actually, Micro Focus made a great deal of cash in the nineties by providing COBOL development on the PC. COBOL programmers who were maintaining applications on a mainframe were no longer tied to an 8-color terminal connected at 9600 baud, or by using a terminal-emulation program that was just as bad. Compuware also put out a number of mainframe tools that were heavily used. I wonder if Micro Focus got those as well?

Re:Who is Micro Focus?

[SCPRedMage]

First thing to cross my mind when I read the headline was "holy crap, Borland's still around?"

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.
           

Re:Who is Micro Focus?

[ConceptJunkie]

I'm not sure which company surprised me more that it still existed! I was a MAJOR fan of Borland's products starting with Turbo Pascal 1... you have to remember that way back then compiling and linking even a 50-line Fortran program was a several minute operation, and suddenly it went down to several seconds.

I hung tough with Borland products for about 8 years, even buying Turbo Pascal 4 around 1988, just for the editor, even though I no longer used Pascal. I took advantage, along with several co-workers of a misprint in Egghead's flyer for the week to pick up Borland C++ 1.0, and later did some serious OWL program. To this day, I still think OWL was far better than MFC.

I even thought Object Pascal was a nice implementation, and would have enjoyed using it if the team had decided that way. They ended up going with Microsoft C++, which was good, even if MFC at the time was nothing better than a half-hearted first cut.

I spent many years using Visual C++ and generally loved it. To this day, VS6 is my favorite IDE. None of my clients and employers ever made the jump to .NET and by 2004 or so, I'd made the jump to working on Linux middleware... no so much because I didn't want to Windows any more, but because that's was the best job available.

As of today, I'm glad I'm not doing Windows C++ programming any more. The number of layers between the code and the metal has become so ridiculous you're hardly programming at all. It's all just cookbook code to use Microsoft's byzantine libraries, and then reverse-engineering them when they don't do what you expect or what the documentation says. Of course, one could argue it's always been like that, but 10 years ago, it was possible to rewrite and/or extend most of MFC into something really slick and way easier and faster to use. I know because I did it. Nowadays, I would dread having to wade into the enormous amount of stuff involved in Windows programming... whether it's good or bad, it's massive and complicated, and those are two things I can't abide.

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?

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

TSR

[caffeinemessiah]

Sidekick, a DOS-based terminate-and-stay-resident personal productivity application

Aaah good old terminate-and-stay-resident programs, from the heydays of non-multitasking OSs. Anyone else remember Int 27h and the magic of hooking a subroutine to make it appear like your OS was actually multitasking? Hmph...kids these days..

Re:TSR

[Dave Emami]

Aaah good old terminate-and-stay-resident programs,

Terminate and stay resident? You mean, when a cyborg that looks like Arnold Scharzenegger kills someone and then moves into their house?

ah borland

[Zashi]

I remember, back in the day, when all malware was written in borland C/C++.

Er.. not that i wrote malware. >_>

C++ Builder is the best C++ IDE for RAD, by far.

[master_p]

It's a shame that they are going under, because C++ Builder is he best C++ IDE for Rapid Application Development, by far.

You can design forms and controls in the same way as Visual Basic, but it is C++.

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.

Turbo C

[__aanonl8035]

Let us not forget that Borland had a pretty dominate position in the programming C/C++ IDE market way
back in the early 90s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_C%2B%2B

I remember all of the C programming college courses in my area all used Turbo C as the preferred IDE.

I remember that many folks claimed Microsoft sabotaged Borland's product by integrating their Visual Studio with windows in ways that Borland just could not do. This was years before the Netscape lawsuit! I even seem to recall reading that Microsoft was accused of preying on Borland's staff and hiring them away. Perhaps someone with more knowledge than I can provide some more information on those bygone days.

Re:How many more

[sopssa]

Being a Delphi programmer I noticed this news and thought wtf, but it must be noted that Delphi along other programming stuff was moved under CodeGear a few years ago and wasnt included in the purchase.

Still, I have high respect for Borland and the fact they provided early Delphi's for free on my teenage years when noone else did. I still enjoy Delphi as the most rapid programming tool, because it nicely integrates easy of GUI design but still powerful and fast code.

Borland raided by Microsuck...

[GPLDAN]

http://www.networkworld.com/news/1997/0512borland.html


In the end, Microsoft strategy of simply throwing obscene salaries at the Borland talent ultimately worked. It was systematic, it was effective.

Now go suck on Visual Studio.

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:Borland Turbo Assembler

[Jerrry]

Turbo C++ came years after Borland's original product: Turbo Pascal.

I started with Turbo Pascal with version 1.0. At the time, it was a revelation because it cost $49.00 in the days when PC development tools typically cost many hundreds of dollars, and because of its speed. It could compile a several thousand line Pascal program in just a few seconds. Other compilers of the time, such as Microsoft Pascal, took many minutes to compile the same code. It was limited, however, to 64K of code because the compiler created .COM files.

The compiler was so fast that Turbo Pascal was the rapid development tool of the 1980s on the PC. Nothing else could approach its speed.

While Phillipe Khan always maintained that he was the developer of the Turbo Pascal code, it was actually Anders Hejlsberg, the architect of C#, that actually wrote the code.

Re:C++ Builder is the best C++ IDE for RAD, by far

[StikyPad]

Only with .NET has Microsoft finally caught up with RAD form design. .NET is over 7 years old now... You might as well be railing against Windows 98.

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

[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.

Re:You are Micro Focus

[fm6]

Algol was invented during that time frame. It had problems of its own, but it was the first step towards modern block-structured languages like Pascal and C. COBOL was a big step in the wrong direction. I mean, a compiler for "English"? Didn't it occur to Ensign Hopper that there's a reason mathematicians don't work in plain language?

I was on the Unix side, so my involvement with workstations was limited to being an end user. But I did have an nGen (which Burroughs OEMed as the B20 series) on my desk. I'll always be sorry that there was no place for the thing once lack of total IBM compatibility became a deal-breaker. There were so many things that were better thought out than other systems. Like those external, passively-cooled power supplies. And a keyboard where they actually thought through serious use cases, instead of just kludging onto the original teletype keyboard, as most keyboards still do.

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

[fm6]

Troll? What idiot did I offend this time? And how? Is somebody a Grace Hopper fanboy? If so, you really need to get a life!

Re:You are Micro Focus

[LWATCDR]

"Borland's tools are really kewl, but they've never gained serious mindshare"
Wrong. Borland had more mindshare than Microsoft in development tools.
Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Borland Pascal, Borland C and C++ where all more popular than Microsoft's tools. One reason was the cost. You could buy Turbo Pascal for around 10th the cost of a compiler from Microsoft. It also came with an IDE. Before that a lot of programmers used Wordstar to edit their code!
Borland lost mindshare and didn't do all that well during the migration to Windows. Frankly that is what really did in a lot of companies and Microsoft replaced them all! Lotus, Ashton-Tate, WordPerfect, and Borland all did very well until Microsoft pretty much killed them all. And yes a good part of it was caused by their failure to produce good Windows products.

"This compiler was, weirdly enough, written in COBOL. Somebody once explained to me why this made sense, but I've forgotten the explanation."
It is called bootstrapping.
The logic is this. If you make improvements in the compiler then you make improvements in your own product.
Let's say you create a better code generator. When you recompile your own compiler it will run faster since it is being compiled with that improved code generator.
It also helps you find bugs since you are using your own compiler everyday to write your compiler.

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:C++ Builder is the best C++ IDE for RAD, by far

[Anonymous Coward]

All the developer tools were shipped off to CodeGear a few years ago. They are now owned by Embarcadero who are starting to invest more heavily in R&D. Delphi and C++ Builder 2009 are a vast improvement on the previous offerings.

Bring Back Paradox

[Doc Ruby]

My favorite Borland product was Paradox for Windows, a RDBMS engine and GUI with IDE. The engine was available as a C++ library for embedding. It brought together programming and data techniques from spreadsheets, databases, languages and GUIs that made "Windows" a complete and consistent platform.

Borland, or somebody, could do exactly that with existing OSS code today. The software world could use such a tidy tool, and especially a competent company to market it. Maybe that's Oracle now, but the game is just getting rebooted again.

Embarcadero already has the good stuff.

[tjstork]

All the people remembering Borland's language wars with Microsoft, and came up on the other side, should know that all of those tools were sold to Embarcadero some time ago. The Borland that we knew has already been gone for quite some time. Turbo C++, C++ Builder, Turbo Pascal, JBuilder, etc, all live on at Embarcadero. In fact, I think Embarcadero even got the Borland database...

Re:How many more

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW Delphi 2009 supports C# style generics, anonymous methods, inferred typing and deferred execution all in native code w/o .NET

Delphi is still very much a viable platform for new software!

Don't Forget Quattro and Paradox

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

Two very popular Borland products back in the day were the Quattro Pro spreadsheet and the Paradox relational database. Quattro Pro had WYSIWYG and three dimensional features running on DOS way before Lotus. Paradox was a huge advance over dBase III in ease of use and report writing.

If you had 2 MB of system RAM, they could both exist in system memory at the same time and swap back and forth. Not quite multitasking, but innovative at the time. Using DR DOS made the memory tricks easier. Ah... memories.

This is not Borland

[ZioPino]

I worked in Borland, when it was indeed Borland. Great company, you could not find another place with so many fine minds.
What is called Borland today is not the company that people knew. The management stole the name, connected it with mindless, buzzword-rich nonsense and moved the headquesters from Scotts Valley to Texas. They were selling nothing and that's what MicroFocus is buying: nothing.

The core of Borland's business, compilers and IDEs was spun off as CodeGear, recently purchased by Embarcadero Software. CodeGear is still located in Scotts Valley with many of the original developers in the group. Great people with a passion for tool development.
It's not a coincidence that Borland, the travesty, has been losing money at incredible speed after CodeGear was gone. The only part of the business that made sense, that generated revenues, was let go by a management simply unable to understand what a compiler is.
That the name Borland, which was synonym of innovation and "barbarian" spirit, is now associated with the leading name in a technology that was an embarrassment in the 80s, COBOL, is a shame that makes me cringe to no end.
Remember, this is not Borland, the real Borland, the one that brought us such gems as Turbo Pascal, C++ builder, Paradox, JBuilder etc, and that in general taught Microsoft how to write IDEs, is called CodeGear.
The company mentioned in this article, is a travesty and a sham.

The Borland Museum

[Orion Blastar]

The Borland Museum has the old Turbo series of Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and Turbo C++ for MS-DOS downloadable for free.

Turbo Pascal and Delphi got replaced by Free Pascal, and Turbo C++ got replaced with GNU C++ and MinGW C++ for Windows which are open source alternatives to them. Which I think is why the Borland Museum got opened and why the command line version of Borland C++ was given away for free.

While people were waiting for the Borland Museum to release Delphi 1.0 the Lazarus Project was developed based on Free Pascal to replace Delphi.

Re:How many more

[tondrej]

Yes, in my experience 2009 is rock solid. 2007 was already OK. I agree 2005 was crap.

Re:So Long... Star Team

[Haelyn]

Other than frequent crashes, s l o w r e f r e s h e s, a Java client made by saboteurs, a couple hundred millions interface inconsistences(in most screens, pressing enter or escape do nothing), a braindead labeling schema, tectonic-speed checkouts, rude and intrusive dialogs that steal focus from whatever the fuck you're doing, the fucking JVM that eats oodles of RAM, the goddamn interface that suddenly frozes for a minute or ten, the motherfucking MPX, the metric fucktons of annoying as hell bugs that send your goddamn motherfucking productivity down the tubes, the incredibly shitty compare and merge tool and a couple other things that spring readily to mind no, there's nothing bad

Yes, I'm a CM and use Starteam daily for my sins. Why do you ask?