As someone who used delphi throughout the transition from borland, to inprise, to eventually getting bought out by embarcadero my perception was always that their management wanted to be in a different business than desktop developer tools and would use the revenue from delphi to “diversify”, while structurally underinvesting in the product and regularly raising its price. It wasn’t necessarily wrong to see desktop development as a dead end, but they failed to make something as great as delphi to replace it, and gradually became irrelevant.
Anders Hejlsberg developed Delphi for Borland and then went on to have significant contributions to C# and then Type Script. That guy is clearly a genius.
They tried to rebrand themselves as being "enterprise" - renaming to "Insprise" or something IIRC - and that immediately alienated their main customer base, couple that with the advent of "good enough" drag and drop UI building for .NET, and the eventual LINQ stuff as well I guess? (never a DB engineer which was a big part of Delphi's fanbase) and it simply couldn't charge the premium it former did.
Quick googling shows it may have rebranded to Embarcadero now? or been purchased - it is unclear, but it looks like Delphi and C++ Builder still exist as products?
To this day Microsoft hasn't been able to match Delphi's workflows for AOT deployment (they killed .NET Native), nor C++ Builder (they also killed C++/CX).
Sorry, I want to be clear here that this is not intended as a snide/asshole question, what do you mean by
> Delphi's workflows for AOT deployment (they killed .NET Native), nor C++ Builder (they also killed C++/CX).
Specifically in this context what is ".NET Native"? Just the period where they started favoring .NET vs real compilation* - and honestly I never used C++ Builder to think my views or experience of it as a product are super useful for anyone interested in them.
My original "real" language was Delphi, and I basically stopped with Delphi 4 I think? (this was a long time ago) - I recall there being a bunch of reasons, but the core fast is that I simply stopped using it.
* I personally think as a VM and runtime .net is pretty great, however back then I was using inline assembly for terrible performance stuff and losing that was very sad.
Basically what .NET v 1.0 should have been all along, had Ext-VOS project not decided to go after Java (using J++), and then eventually adopt COOL, turning it into C# and CLR.
C++ Builder allows for Delphi like development, or VB like if you prefer, while having access to the whole C and C++ ecosystem.
Only matched for a brief time period by C++/CX, but WinDev mutiny managed to kill it.
Both are still available on UWP workloads, specially since WinUI 3.0 and WinAppSDK are limping along, so regardless of the community talks, maybe in two years they reach feature parity if they don't lose focus.
So regardless of the official message, Windows 11 and 12 most likely as well, depend on plenty of UWP code.
Borland had an office suite and a bunch of developer tools that competed with Microsoft.
I guess the Apple investment turned out better. Borland is long gone.