Ken Henderson recently posted this missive, saying goodbye to Borland and providing a few very interesting tidbits about the company's history.  I personally wouldn't proclaim Borland dead at this point.  Yes, it's a bummer for them that Danny Thorpe moved on recently, but it's not entirely unusual for an engineer to seek a new challenge after 15-some-odd years with one company.  Ken brings up many good points in his article, although there are also a few points for which I'd like to offer my own opinion.

I worked at Borland between 1993 and 1998, so I missed the high times and drama of the 80s and early 90s.  However, if there were such a thing as software industry scholars, they would all agree that the acquisition of Ashton-Tate in 1991 was the beginning of the end of Borland as a software industry leader.  It was pretty much downhill from there, as so eloquently expressed in lyric in Dr. Dobb's Journal in September of 1994:

Borland ate
Ashton-Tate
Learned that it was poison, but by then it was too late.

One additional massive mistake that Ken doesn't mention is the price war Borland set off in the office software market by pricing Quattro Pro for Windows at $49 (down from $495!) in 1992.  Competitors were forced to similarly reduce their prices, but the competitors happened to execute better and have more formidable price war-sustaining resources.  It was too late when Borland realized they had brought a knife to a gunfight; they couldn't under-price or out-channel Microsoft's office productivity software.

I also see Anders' choice to leave Borland for Microsoft in 1996 differently than Ken.  Yes, it was obviously not a Good Thing for Borland that Anders chose to move on, but would it really have made a difference if Anders had stayed?  Personally, I believe it would have made little difference in the long run.  The fact of the matter is that the company was already at that time looking for a way out of the developer tools space.  As a result, I don't believe Anders' work was valued by the company the way it should have been.  As such, Anders' departure wasn't so much a "misstep" by the company as an obvious consequence of their strategic direction at the time.

It's also worth discussing the "choice" of Pascal as the language for Delphi.  I've had this asked of me many times over the years.  Why Pascal and not C++?  Look, it's simple: Delphi was Pascal because Delphi was invented by the Pascal team.  Delphi was a brilliant, but very organic, evolution of Turbo Pascal for Windows.  For a variety of technical reasons, implementing a Delphi-like tool for C++ required a great deal more engineering effort, but Borland did make this investment and shipped C++Builder about 2 years after the first release of Delphi.  However, the product never captured the hearts and minds (nor much market share) of C++ developers.

The C++ market in general is another sad episode in Borland's history.  In the early 90's, they were up around 85% share of the PC C/C++ compiler market.  Today I believe they're somewhere in the single digits.  This makes me sad not just because of my Borland history but also because I have a sincere belief that their enthusiastic participation in the C++ compiler market would raise the water level for all of us and ultimately translate into better tools for developers.  Borland seems to be reinvesting in C++ recently, so I'm looking forward to seeing some innovation from them in this area.

The situation at Borland certainly isn't all wine and roses, but then again, this is hardly news; it hasn't been wine and roses since the early 1990s.