
Why did Borland fail? - networked
http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail/answer/Danny-Thorpe?share=1&
======
_ak
As a former Borland employee (not for very long, 2006-2009, and actually
working in their Austrian offices, which originally became part of the company
through the Segue acquisition), I certainly didn't have the complete picture,
but our managers, even going as far as those located in Cupertino, and later
Austin, were quite open about what Borland's issue was: even with the rise of
Java, they thought they could continue in the IDE business like they did
before. Apparently, JBuiler used to be their #1 cash cow. Well, until Eclipse
came along: within 18 months, JBuilder license sales dropped to essentially
zero. They eventually realized that the whole IDE market was dead, so that was
spun off into CodeGear, JBuilder was relaunched as an Eclipse distribution
with "premium" extensions, and CodeGear was ultimately sold to Embarcadero,
while the rest of the company was trying to refocus on producing software for
other parts of the development lifecycle, from requirements management to
automated testing and test management (hence Segue) to SCM. Company
performance was atrocious, and that really screwed over people that took part
in the employee share program, but they somehow managed to make it over to get
acquired by Micro Focus.

~~~
meddlepal
Someone should tell JetBrains the whole IDE market is dead.

~~~
_ak
I'm not saying the market is still dead, but for a company like Borland, 10
years ago there was nothing they could have done to recover from Eclipse
taking over the market. Even then, IntelliJ was a relative niche product
(compared to the vast ubiquity of Eclipse), and JetBrains did diversify their
product portfolio to both more aspects of the development lifecycle and to
more specialized needs in IDEs. Anyway, my point was that Eclipse was a game-
changer that triggered great change in Borland.

~~~
MichaelCrawford
I regard Eclipse as a tool of the Devil. I'll be taking up Android again soon.
Every time I try I find Eclipse giving me the goatse but now I'm going to use
TextWrangler and Ant.

~~~
lvillani

      > I'll be taking up Android again soon. Every time I try I find Eclipse [...]
    

Is there a particular reason to choose Eclipse instead of Android Studio?
Google is pushing its weight on the latter with their Eclipse+ADT combo being
essentially on life support (and for good reason since Android Studio provides
a vastly better experience).

Moreover, the next version of Android Studio will include C/C++ support based
on JetBrains' CLion that will cover development with the NDK.

~~~
MichaelCrawford
I didn't know about Android Studio, I'll give it a try.

I actually like IDEs quite a lot, what I don't like are IDEs like netbeans,
eclipse, visual studio or xcode.

I loved codewarrior absolutely to death, I was heavily into thinkc, the first
development tool I ever bought with my own money was lightspeedc which fit on
a floppy.

~~~
harkyns_castle
Metrowerks Codewarrior has fond memories for me too (although I have never had
a problem with Eclipse aside from bloated J2EE bundles like WSAD etc. It's
easy to set it up to be quick and unobstrusive I've found).

------
adrianlmm
I used Delphi for more tan 10 years, so this is what I believe it went wrong:

    
    
        * They lost Anders Hejlsberg
        * Free compilers got aceptable.
        * Lack of back compatibility, new VCL components from  one version weren't compatible with older ones, every new versión require to biy the new components.
        * To expensive.
        * No new books to learn Delphi, they are to old.
    

I'm still using Delphi 7 for some projects.

~~~
T-A
Pretty much my view too. Anyone who knew Delphi immediately went "OMG that's
Delphi/VCL with C-like syntax!" when they saw C#/.NET ca ~2000. And once
Microsoft started giving away VS Express for free in 2005, Borland's original
market - IDEs and compilers for the masses - was well and truly dead.

It's easy to blame management for shifting focus to enterprise software, but
they had to try doing something new.

~~~
acqq
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg)

"In 1996, Hejlsberg left Borland and joined Microsoft." "Since 2000, he has
been the lead architect of the team developing the language C#."

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB863034062733665000](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB863034062733665000)

1997: "Microsoft also offered Mr. Hejlsberg a $1.5 million signing bonus, a
base salary of $150,000 to $200,000 and options for 75,000 shares of Microsoft
stock. After Borland's counteroffer last October, Microsoft offered another
$1.5 million bonus, the complaint says."

~~~
neuro
The first time I saw Hejlsberg was from this delphi easter egg:

[http://www.blong.com/Undocumented/Delphi1.htm](http://www.blong.com/Undocumented/Delphi1.htm)

------
asveikau
Compilers used to be something you paid money for. It took a while, but open
source and I would say gcc in particular killed that.

It's funny how gcc was around for a long time, but it was only in the 2000s
that cash cow compilers started dying. I think that coincides a bit with Linux
and OS X becoming popular for developers. For example, it wasn't until 2005
that Microsoft started providing a VS express SKU.

You see Linux start to kill old school commercial Unix (like Sun) around the
same time. Probably the same trend.

~~~
RogerL
I remember in the 90s advocating for things like gcc and the absolute scorn I
would receive. "A free compiler!!! What kind of crap must that be??". You paid
for compilers, you paid for your version control, you paid for your bug
tracker, and that was that.

Interestingly, at that company (a defense contractor) it was the government
more than anything that changed that attitude. There were a lot of projects
initiated by the DoD designed to test whether Linux and other open software
were a good choice. Attitudes slowly came around.

And it (paid=good) is not an entirely unfounded position. There was some
really bad OS software, and Visual Studio is still top by some measures
(quality of the debugger). But the amount of pain noncompliance of the VS
compiler brought was just frustrating. And if you want really fast code on x86
it still makes sense to buy the Intel compilers (C++ and Fortran).

~~~
douche
If the VS debugger is king of the hill, then it must be really grim out there.
At least half the time, I'm using printf debugging because actually running in
the debugger brings my entire machine (16 GB RAM, quad-core intel) to a
standstill.

~~~
asveikau
Folks who have figured out windbg's learning curve will know that VS isn't
even the best debugger from Microsoft.

------
stared
Answers to two (closed) Stack Exchange questions are relevant:

What happened to Borland Delphi?
[http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/83009/what-
ha...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/83009/what-happened-to-
borland-delphi)

Why has C prevailed over Pascal?
[http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/114846/why-
ha...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/114846/why-has-c-
prevailed-over-pascal)

~~~
escaped_hn
A closed stackexchange question? Ya don't say!

~~~
ta92929
And here I thought it was just the stackoverflow mods that closed everything
and you were supposed to take stuff like this to stackexchange.

------
troymc
I laughed at "...building the software analogs of sewer systems, utility
poles, or synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats."

It derives from a Steven Wright Joke:

"All of the people in my building are insane. The guy above me designs
synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats. The lady across the hall tried to rob a
department store... with a pricing gun... She said, "Give me all of the money
in the vault, or I'm marking down everything in the store..."

[http://www.humournet.com/misc.humour/steven_wright.txt](http://www.humournet.com/misc.humour/steven_wright.txt)

------
sprior
They started out making Turbo Pascal a great product that anyone could afford,
but it was so much cheaper than the "professional tools" everyone else was
selling that businesses wouldn't take them seriously - there had to be a catch
to the cheap price. So eventually Borland suddenly decided to at least triple
the price starting with one of its versions, but it didn't work, they didn't
gain ground against Microsoft and they lost the hobbyist developer.

~~~
sigzero
That is a good summation.

------
bbarn
Turbo Pascal was the first software I remember buying in a retail box. Before
then it was all copied and school-given software, but something in 15 year old
me really felt it was worth buying this tool.

It was. That purchase spawned a career out of my evening hobby. Then, a few
years later, when I was mostly using C or VB, and only firing up Pascal for
fun now and then, Delphi came out. I was super excited. Until I realized I
could barely use it, and none of my local book stores had anything on it that
was helpful to read.

By the time the internet came along, and I got into full time development..
.net was out, with "academic" pricing for VS 2003. That purchase brought me
real jobs, at real companies.

So, for me.. Borland got me curious, got me hooked, then I switched to tools
that got me money. Maybe that's because the ecosystem had changed, but I can't
be the only one.

~~~
laumars
> By the time the internet came along, and I got into full time development..
> .net was out, with "academic" pricing for VS 2003.

The _web_ was around for about decade before Microsoft .NET arrived. In fact I
remember coding Delphi in an evaluation copy of the IDE given away on a cover
CD from .Net magazine (not to be confused with Microsoft .NET). And then a few
years later downloading a pirated copy of a beta release of Visual Studio
.NET.

It was actually the web that introduced me to Borland's Windows IDEs. I'd used
Turbo Pascal extensively, but then got hooked on Visual Studio once I migrated
away from DOS. Then I started seeing talk of these Borland development
environments for Windows and thought " _I love TP, so why not give these a
shot_ ". I actually much preferred those IDE's to Visual Studio as well, but
alas my career and personal interest was switching to non-Windows technologies
at that point and thus I never really found a practical use for Borland's
Windows compilers.

A few years back I did need to throw together a basic Windows app for some
clients, but by that point Delphi was dead and I'd forgotten a lot of Pascal's
nuances anyway. So I ended up knocking up something in VB.NET; which was
actually less painful than I remembered from the .NET 1.0 days. In fact almost
pleasurable. But for all of Pascal / Delphi's warts, I did very much prefer
that language over any of the iterations of Visual Basic. In fact I think I'd
probably go further and say I preferred it over C/C++ as well.

~~~
Ecio78
Actually I remember that Delphi was way more advanced on the TCP/IP side
compared to Visual Basic. I remember downloading (for free) quite complete
TCP/IP VCLs that included http, ftp, icmp etc.. compared to VB that had
nothing (at least for free).

~~~
laumars
VB and VB.NET are different languages. But yeah, Delphi ran circles around VB
in nearly every measurable way. I don't think anyone would seriously argue
that VB6 was a better language nor had the better tooling. And earlier
versions of VB would have only compared even worse.

As for what libraries VB had for networking, there was some HTTP OCX that was
bundled with Internet Explorer (and I don't mean the Trident renderer), which
was awful. But aside that, there was only a basic wrapper around the Winsock C
libraries. To be fair, the Winsock OCX was pretty decent fot what it was, but
you were left to write all the host layers (OSI) for yourself.

~~~
Ecio78
I am fully aware VB and VB.NET are two different languages :) Actually at the
time I am talking about, .NET has not been invented yet (wikipedia says 2012),
and it was invented by the guy cited in this thread as ex chief dev of Delphi:

My post was just to say that Delphi had quite advanced TCP/IP components
options compared to other languages of that time (I cited VB because it was
supposed to be the "easiest" language of the period)

~~~
laumars
_> Actually at the time I am talking about, .NET has not been invented yet
(wikipedia says 2012)_

I assume you mean 2002? FYI .NET was available to some developers before 2002,
that was just the first non-beta release :)

 _> I am fully aware VB and VB.NET are two different languages...I cited VB
because it was supposed to be the "easiest" language of the period_

I mistook your post to reference Visual Basic because I mentioned it in my
post where I discussed VB.NET. I say this because opening your post with
"actually" suggested you meant your reply as a correction to my comment. So it
wasn't clear to me that your post was intended purely as an interesting yet
tangential anecdote.

------
gjkood
I have to say that Borland TurboPascal 3.0 (or earlier) was one of the finest
pieces of software that I have ever seen. A full fledged Pascal compiler and a
Wordstar compatible editor in a 29K binary. Where have those days gone?

~~~
FrankenPC
The speed of the compiler! What an amazing environment. If they had continued
to evolve with the tech industry they would have been gods.

------
protomyth
_In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yokam, one of
many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million
loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yokam replied
without hesitation "Absolutely."_

They stopped selling $49.95 compilers with IDEs and tried to be an enterprise
company. People still buy IDEs and compilers. If they had kept doing what they
were doing and improving their products, they would have been fine. Instead,
they wanted the big money and it didn't happen.

~~~
bluedino
They also sold $299 and $499 compilers

It's weird thinking we used to pay for compilers

~~~
DCoder
> _It 's weird thinking we used to pay for compilers_

People still do. For example, Intel sells several compilers:
[https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-
compilers](https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-compilers)

------
alecco
Not a single mention of all the dirty tricks by Microsoft?!

What a shallow memory. I remember how Microsoft cornered Borland and others to
use some undocumented features of their OS, then make them incompatible.
Remember, back in the 90s updating software on mass scale was a PITA, end
users were expected to never update.

Also abusing their dominance to aggressively target key developers and
contractors, copying any good application in the ecosystem and _bundling_ it.

But SV didn't learn the lesson and we are now in more abusive walled gardens
for or mobile phones. And some young people parroting how wonderful Microsoft
and Bill Gates are today.

~~~
nadams
> And some young people parroting how wonderful Microsoft and Bill Gates are
> today.

Compared to what Microsoft used to be like - recently Microsoft has made some
pretty, surprising, awesome moves.

Specifically their open source movement (including .Net). You would never have
seen that 10-20 years ago. I'm sure if you walked into Gates's office and said
"I think we should open source this" \- I have a feeling he would fire you on
the spot.

They even now support Linux on their Azure platform - and that's not a it-
will-run-but-you-are-on-your-own.

Now, I'm not saying Microsoft is a saint or that I would want to work for
them. But considering they didn't take action against the mono or ReactOS
projects makes them ok in my book (not that they would have any real legal
case - but they could drag those projects through an expensive lawsuit which
would just end up with a deal to cease development).

~~~
sfk
I've said this before (and was downvoted naturally):

Microsoft's new Open Source strategy needs to be viewed with exactly the same
amount of suspicion as IBM's and Oracle's.

It may just be a move to reduce their expenses, since they may get unpaid
software contributions and testing (Oracle's CEO pretty much admitted this in
an interview).

~~~
douche
I view it as an attack on the LAMP stack. Mono with self-hosted HTTP throw
OWIN seems like a killer option. Let's face it, C# is a much better language
for development than Java.

------
davidw
Borland gets a lot of mentions in this book, which is very interesting as well
as entertaining:

"In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters"
[http://www.amazon.com/Search-Stupidity-High-Tech-
Marketing-D...](http://www.amazon.com/Search-Stupidity-High-Tech-Marketing-
Disasters/dp/1590591046/?tag=dedasys-20)

I'd highly recommend it. Technology changes, but people don't.

------
orionblastar
The Borland Turbo languages where the Cat's Pajamas.

Microsoft countered with the Quick languages.

Borland made Turbo Pascal for Windows and with Objects and then made Delphi.

Microsoft countered with Visual BASIC.

Borland made Borland C++ and JBuiilder.

Microsoft countered with Visual C++ and Visual J++/J# and then later Visual
C#.

The free IDEs and Free compiler languages ate into Borland's sales. Eclipse,
Netbeans, IntelliJ, BlueJ, Sublime Text, GNU C/C++, Apple XCode,
FreePascal/Lazarus, Ruby/Ruby on Rails, Python, Code::Blocks, etc.

In 2005 Microsoft introduce Visual Studio Express a free version of their
development tools.

Like Amiga, Borland had the superior technology, but cheaper/free alternatives
undercut their sales.

Mostly it was the free and open source revolution that did Borland in.

------
CamperBob2

       In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked 
       Del Yokam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you 
       saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers 
       for a hundred $1 million customers?"  Yokam replied 
       without hesitation "Absolutely."
    

Any day of the week! Why is this even in question?

~~~
rytis
Losing one customer can either mean: a) losing $100 b) losing $1'000'000\.
What do you pick?

~~~
whyleyc
The inverse is also true.

~~~
jack9
The inverse is the same.

Losing $1mil can either mean: a) losing 10000 customers b) losing 1 customer.
What do you pick?

There are more customers who can afford 100$ than 1mil. That's the important
factor, not the way you want to present the numbers.

~~~
smitherfield
Not really. Small customers are sensitive to fads and trends, while enterprise
customers (particularly in the field of software, as we all know!) will stick
with a product well past its sell-by date as long as it "works." You have a
lot more time to pivot when you start losing enterprise customers than small
customers.

------
revanx_
Borland had its moments, Delphi(RAD successor to Turbo Pascal) was a total hit
with Delphi 7 being the pinacle, unfortunatelly after that all went down the
hill. Later on in 2008 Embarcadero Technologies picked up Delphi and has been
selling it ever since.

If anyone is interested, Delphi today is on life support and exists only
because it still has a strong base of followers from the Borland time. The
rapid cost of development has pushed Delphi out of reach for younger
generations who are not used to paying for development tools.

------
jcrites
(My memory could be off; it was a long time ago, and I was young)

I believe that I first began learning to program in Turbo C or C++ and Turbo
Pascal, far before I ever encountered Microsoft development tools, except
maybe VB6, or other open source ones. I was young, in high school or earlier
at the time, taking a summer school "computer camp" at a local college [1]. I
remember learning Visual Delhi and C++Builder, and being amazed. I think
Microsoft only had VB6 at the time. Visual Delphi and C++Builder were
polished, and I was super excited to build applications with them, and I did.

Then VB began evolving, Microsoft released .NET. One Borland renamed
themselves Inprise and seemed to disappear.(Inprise -> Enterprise?)

If Borland hand't build these consumer products, I might not have gotten into
programming, or as early as I did. It helped me find my
scientific/intellectual/professional love and, which led to a job at Amazon I
continue to practice and are very happy with today.

Farewell, Borland! You did good. You helped inspire this student to learn
computer science and begin his career.

[1] Scripps or Harvey Mudd -- somewhere in the Claremont Colleges, in Steele
Hall.

------
GnarfGnarf
I loved Turbo C. I learned C from it. The manuals were beautiful, lucid and
generous. Borland C++ 3.1 was head & shoulders above Programmer's Workbench.
Unfortunately it fell apart at 4.5.

------
gizi
Borland specialized in supplying tools that assisted in building windows-only
desktop GUIs which would in turn access a database sitting somewhere on a LAN.
As soon as the market moved to web GUIs, and hosting on linux, they were dead.

------
andrewstuart
Embarcadero is still not getting it right. They know how to build great tech
but are terrible marketers. Consider for example right now they sell a range
of cross platform development tools. But there's no way to view a range of
impressive showcase/example apps on each platform to see what can be done. So
there's no strong motivation to use their tools.

People evaluating new development tools want to see and be impressed by what
can be done with it. That sort of thing just isn't a priority for Embarcadero.

------
pjbrunet
IMO it was the Internet. C and Pascal dominated till 1994, then Java books
were everywhere. I loved TP5 (the manual was awesome) but dropped everything
to learn Java which promised the world: write once, run everywhere and
Internet applications! Woohoo. Then Perl and Javascript were on the scene.
WIRED magazine! Very exciting times. Netscape Navigator Gold baby. Delphi was
"Microsloth Windoze" not even on my radar.

------
pgrote
On the non-dev front, I used Quattro Pro a bunch and loved it. What I really
enjoyed was their word processor, Sprint.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(word_processor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_\(word_processor\))

Sprint gave complete control over all the aspects of document production.
Loved it.

~~~
raldi
What aspects of document production did the competition not provide control
over?

------
chris_wot
This is an interesting comment. I think you can actually move from the IDE
space and gradually bring in features that are of interest to Enterprise
customers, who then adopt your product.

I'm watching Qlikview do this right now - their original product was and still
is a client app for Windows. It allows any business user to pull through
datasets of pretty much any source as a poor mans ETL, then it allows that
user to do BI tasks in a very simple way. Where they are succeeding is that
they haven't given up on this market, but are using it to drive interest from
inside companies - eventually skunkworks divisions show its value to the
business, which then buys the server software and licenses.

It's growing pretty rapidly, and they seem to have a sustainable model. But
it's driven by the individual user.

------
jniles
Not having been a developer in the Borland era, the most valuable take-away
for me is this statement:

"On paper this may seem like a fairly minor adjustment, if you have the
attitude (as Borland executive management had) that developers are a dime a
dozen and any developer can be applied to any product or problem space. That
may work for technical programming skills but it doesn't work for passion."

Regardless of what the technical abilities of the product, it's a good
reminder that a product made great by the hard work of people who believe in
it should be mindful to prioritize their ambitions in product decisions. This
is particularly relevant in the open source world.

------
therealmarv
related: [http://www.vcljs.com/](http://www.vcljs.com/) I wondered myself if a
Delphi approach is existing for web pages anywhere... and found it. hehe

------
thewhitetulip
Pro tip: Add an ? to make the annoying quora "login" dialog disappear,
www.quora.com/Diary/? even this will make it disappear, no need to add the
?share=1 thing :D

------
stark3
It was a long time ago, and I can't find anything to corroborate this on
internet searches, but:

Didn't Borland attempt to charge for the use of a c runtime module? They
attempted to profit from software developed using their c compiler. So, not
only would they make money selling the compiler, but anyone that used programs
written with their compiler would have to pay also.

Somewhere around that time, they lost the whole c compiler market, I think.

~~~
dwc
Not sure if it's the same thing you're talking about, but waaay back they did
a license change for their language products that said something along the
lines of anything produced with their compilers belonged to them. There was a
huge outcry and pretty much right away they said "oops! our lawyers got a bit
happy" and fixed it. I don't recall exactly when that was. Their Pascal was
"Borland Pascal" at the time. I think that was an honest mistake, as I doubt
anyone there at the time would have thought they'd get away with that.

~~~
pjmlp
Around 1991 timeframe, if I recall correctly.

Basically the EULA forbade the use of Borland C++ to write compilers.

------
desireco42
Borland was beloved company that made tools that made programming enjoyable.
Answer covers all the main points, I can only be sad that they don't exist
today and can make tools. Delphi with all my good will is simply not the tool
I would use today even if it wasn't priced as it is.

~~~
ak39
Why not? If you were to develop Windows desktop applications today, what
choices do you have that compete with Delphi? (Serious question)

------
ape4
Microsoft poached some people. [http://www.zdnet.com/article/borland-sues-ms-
over-staff-poac...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/borland-sues-ms-over-staff-
poaching/)

------
vbezhenar
Delphi was very popular in post-USSR countries. But very few people bought it.
Probably 90% used illegal copies. I guess most people didn't even realize it,
because they bought it on CD and paid $2 for it.

------
Aqwis
You could ask the same question about companies such as Novell or Sun.

~~~
melling
Sun ignored the rise of commodity hardware. They were relying on the Internet
and Wall Street bubble in the late 90's. When those both popped, a Sun took a
big hit.

Anyway, why does answering this help with Borland?

~~~
asveikau
Sun also had an overpriced compiler, to go with the overpriced Unix running on
overpriced hardware. Then it saw these replaced with free, free, and cheaper
products, respectively.

~~~
melling
Sun made its money from hardware. I never worked anywhere that used Sun's
compilers. It was always gcc.

~~~
pjmlp
I did.

We always used the UNIX vendor compilers back when I was doing UNIX
development in the .com days.

------
Speakeasys
Great write up. I always wondered where they went. This was my first IDE when
I took Computer Science 101 in junior college.

------
ergest
It's simple, it got disrupted by free compilers and Microsoft's .NET

------
mike_ivanov
I'm wondering what LispWorks guys would say about it.

------
welshguy
Eclipse.

~~~
babuskov
Actually, what made me stop using Borland (C++ Builder) was switching to Linux
(going to open source GCC and wxWidgets library) and web (Browsers and PHP
getting good enough to build bigger projects in it).

Borland failed to deliver usable solutions for Linux and web at the time and
after I got used to new tools I simply did not bother to try anymore.

------
dschiptsov
Because it was a lousy strategy to try to beat Microsoft in its own game -
creating developer tools?) Also adapting a huge codebase for each new windows
cost too much.

------
MichaelCrawford
It was for quite similar reasons that Live Picture failed.

We had a good product with fanatically devoted users; graphic artists
persisted with LP on Mac OS 9 for years after Mac OS X came into common use.

The problem was that former Apple and Pepsi CEO John Sculley was a major
invester. Live Picture's image editing product, also called Live Picture - was
regarded as a tool by Wall Street and as Sculley told us one day, "The street
does not value tools companies".

So he tried to turn us into some manner of internet company so we could have a
big IPO. Really the best he could come up with was that our - admittedly
superior - competitor to apple's quicktime VR be used over the web for
consumer product research.

He actually showed us a demo that depicted a virtual convenience store shelf
in which one could use the mouse to pick up a tube of toothpaste than look it
over.

LP original retailed for $4k but at the time it was $600. So he was going to
drop a wildly popular six hundred dollar product so we could make a little
coin by measuring websurfer response to animated toothpaste?

The $4K to $600 pricing drop was also a serious problem. While $4K was
definitely too expensive, dropping the price so abruptly alienated our early
adopters.

A while after I left LP, I found a Java memory leak detection tool called I
think Optimize-It. And yes garbage collected languages do suffer memory leaks
if you don't know what you're doing, often seriously so as when I had to
configure a job to reboot a client's server because it kept running out of
swap space.

Optimize-It was independently developed and published at first but Borland
acquired it, then sold it for quite a lot of money.

While a tool like that is indeed valuable, it's a lot cheaper to just reboot
your server every night at midnight.

It should have sold for maybe $200 rather than the thousands of dollars that
Borland charged.

I am quite sad as Borland, Live Picture, Microport, Seagate and the Santa Cruz
Operation once offered really good tech employment to Santa Cruz County.

There are other companies there now so it's not like there is no work, but
attempting to transform what really was a tools company so it would sell
during the internet bubble threw well over fifty hard-working, incredibly
dedicated and talented people out of work.

A coworker and good friend became homeless and quite desperate. I am pleased
to report he did finally find a job and so was able to pay for a place to live
but when I spoke to him while he was homeless he had lost all hope of
survival. Someone like him should never have been homeless.

~~~
michaelbunny
Decisions by companies listed at the stock exchange have to be seen from that
perspective. Software business is an asset business. Software licences are not
apples. For some strange reasons some analysts do believe that a certain kind
of asset is more profitable - selling licences lead to a higher turnover.
That's how software is seen from the investor's perspective.

Software is craftsmanship + plus 'copy' from the distribution perspective.

That's why open source really provides good results. Open source is free
because there is no barter involved. There is no real declining marginal
utility. Every technology that was in the position to grow a reputation busts
exactly the moment the last user installed a copy ...

The marginal utility has to be introduced by design :). Then you get money ...
because you have a price.

------
avodonosov
As good guess as any else.

------
e3pi
See Wikipedia on where Phillipe's successes have been and is doing today: a
smart watch running 2 yrs per charge. His horolog tech is being pursued by at
least two Swiss firms in the Jura. 'Phillipe the Phoenix` is a facile adaptor
I admire.

