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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."
"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.
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
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..
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
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++.
Man - between all that bullshit and bands like "A Flock of Haircuts" it was enough to make Max Headroom hurhurhur-HURL!
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I'm not sure what surprised me more when I read this: that Borland still exists, or that Micro Focus still exists.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you have Tourette's syndrome, or is there some other reason why your post is liberally sprinkled with shouted obscenities?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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...
This is my sig.
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!
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.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
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 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.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Go FORTRAN yourself, you FrameMaker.
"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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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. ;-)