Roy Schestowitz wrote:
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Two Views of Enterprise Open Source
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| Whatever his success with words, he was less fortunate in business. Microsoft
| essentially won the battle for the hearts and minds of the developer
| community, and Borland became something of a lost soul, wandering the fringes
| of computing, trying to find something to do in the shadow of Big Bill and an
| even bigger Microsoft.
|
| One of the people at Microsoft tasked with destroying Borland was Todd
| Nielsen, who was general manager for Microsoft's developer relations and
| platform marketing.
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http://www.computerworlduk.com/toolbox/open-source/blogs/index.cfm?blogid=14&entryid=1293
I don't know if I can be very broken up about the demise of Borland. I
think they really played the same game as MS in regard to programming
languages. There was a similar attack on standards through non-standard
language features and extensions, the desired effect being to lock
developers in to their compilers. The guy who built Turbo Pascal for
Borland is now at MS, being the designer of C#. Borland was very good
about pricing though, at least in the mid 80's, selling Turbo for $50
while MS compilers cost hundreds. They didn't do much about unlicensed
copies because they wanted people to use their compilers. I think there
was substantial affection for Borland among programmers back in the day.
Philippe Kahn used to tell a remarkable story about the launch of
Turbo, at which time he was newly arrived from Austria and almost broke.
I believe by the way that Turbo Pascal was available for CP/M before
it ran on DOS.
Borland came late to the game and so didn't have a chance to compete in
the OS domain.
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