Borland Being Purchased By Micro Focus 351
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."
C++ Builder is the best C++ IDE for RAD, by far. (Score:5, Interesting)
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++.
sad (Score:2, Interesting)
First Sun now Borland? Very sad but in both cases you had good technology and poor management. I realize that IBM's funded free Eclipse made hurt Borland JBuilder sales but to sell off the development tools division? Really?
Turbo C (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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.
Re:Who is Micro Focus? (Score:5, Interesting)
Bring Back Paradox (Score:4, Interesting)
My favorite Borland product was Paradox for Windows [wikipedia.org], a RDBMS engine and GUI with IDE. The engine was available as a C++ library for embedding. It brought together programming and data techniques from spreadsheets, databases, languages and GUIs that made "Windows" a complete and consistent platform.
Borland, or somebody, could do exactly that with existing OSS code today. The software world could use such a tidy tool, and especially a competent company to market it. Maybe that's Oracle now, but the game is just getting rebooted again.
Turbo Pascal rocked! (Score:3, Interesting)
It was blinding fast for a compiler of its day, running on a 1 MHz Z-80. There was no debugger, but if a Turbo Pascal program halted with an error at a given location (which it would politely print out before quitting), you could run the compiler to find out which line of code that location represented. It was cheap, too -- fifty bucks or so at a time when other compiler makers were charging $300 or more.
I wrote a computer game in Turbo Pascal that got me my first job in the game industry. VERY fond memories.
Don't Forget Quattro and Paradox (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Turbo C (Score:3, Interesting)
I fondly remember writing my own GUI environment that ran on top of DOS--I hated Windows 3.11--using Borland C++ using BGI for graphics (although I abstracted it in case I wanted to port) and inline assembly to handle interrupts and for critical sections. I modelled my GUI on AmigaOS (I was missing my Amiga) and it even multitasked. In 2000 I did a rebuild of my system and backed up all my src code onto CD, formatted the drive, installed redhat 5 or something, stuck the CD back in to put my src back on the hard disk... gone. The directory structure was there, but no data. Still annoys me that I lost the src for my DOS GUI. Maybe it was for the best. Anyway, back on topic, I loved the Borland IDEs.
Re:Who is Micro Focus? (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because you haven't heard of Micro Focus does not mean "noone" has. Micro Focus is very well know in every IT shop that has a mainframe. Yes, COBOL is still the mainstay language for applications in large enterprises. They've been predicting it's imminent death for most of the 30 years I've been in IT, but it's still around. Believe it or not, the also push OO COBOL. Yes, it's as bad and idea as it sounds.
The sad thing is that Borland practically invented the IDE. Microsoft hired away the developers during the 90's and was finally able to make Visual Studio a decent platform.
How far they have fallen.
Re:They flew under the radar. (Score:1, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I used to work at Micro Focus, they paid me well and I enjoyed working for them, but heck they were appallingly badly managed at times in the UK and there was a lot of dead wood here that no one had the guts to strip out (the US offices were fine though). I had a LOT of fun working for them though with huge amounts spend on the dining out, free beer, free food and trips abroad.
MF is still around though luck more than anything else. They really suffered when they were asset stripped in the 90s and the whole MERANT debacle. They had/have no really forward thinking products and had to survive hand-to-mouth for quite some time. After Tony Hill left as CEO and the share price crashed, they got a new guy. He seems to have realized that MF have no sexy, fantastic products (only average ones, not detracting it's fine if they make money, but they can struggle) and so they're raising revenue by buying other companies.
It's been tried lots of times before, some times it works, some times it doesn't. I reckon, unless there's been major cultural changes in the last few years from top to bottom, it'll fall apart, sadly, given time. If they've made the changes then they've got a good chance.
I'd definitely work for them again though.
Re:How many more (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, in my experience 2009 is rock solid. 2007 was already OK. I agree 2005 was crap.
Re:You are Micro Focus (Score:4, Interesting)
Algol was invented during that time frame. It had problems of its own, but it was the first step towards modern block-structured languages like Pascal and C. COBOL was a big step in the wrong direction. I mean, a compiler for "English"? Didn't it occur to Ensign Hopper that there's a reason mathematicians don't work in plain language?
I was on the Unix side, so my involvement with workstations was limited to being an end user. But I did have an nGen (which Burroughs OEMed as the B20 series) on my desk. I'll always be sorry that there was no place for the thing once lack of total IBM compatibility became a deal-breaker. There were so many things that were better thought out than other systems. Like those external, passively-cooled power supplies. And a keyboard where they actually thought through serious use cases, instead of just kludging onto the original teletype keyboard, as most keyboards still do.
Re:TSR (Score:3, Interesting)
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..
And they all wanted to be loaded last, and took militant action to make sure that they had their hands on Int27h. I remember reading some assembler source from the era where one of the first chunks of code was commented as "Duke it out with Sidekick"...
Re:Who is Micro Focus? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure which company surprised me more that it still existed! I was a MAJOR fan of Borland's products starting with Turbo Pascal 1... you have to remember that way back then compiling and linking even a 50-line Fortran program was a several minute operation, and suddenly it went down to several seconds.
I hung tough with Borland products for about 8 years, even buying Turbo Pascal 4 around 1988, just for the editor, even though I no longer used Pascal. I took advantage, along with several co-workers of a misprint in Egghead's flyer for the week to pick up Borland C++ 1.0, and later did some serious OWL program. To this day, I still think OWL was far better than MFC.
I even thought Object Pascal was a nice implementation, and would have enjoyed using it if the team had decided that way. They ended up going with Microsoft C++, which was good, even if MFC at the time was nothing better than a half-hearted first cut.
I spent many years using Visual C++ and generally loved it. To this day, VS6 is my favorite IDE. None of my clients and employers ever made the jump to .NET and by 2004 or so, I'd made the jump to working on Linux middleware... no so much because I didn't want to Windows any more, but because that's was the best job available.
As of today, I'm glad I'm not doing Windows C++ programming any more. The number of layers between the code and the metal has become so ridiculous you're hardly programming at all. It's all just cookbook code to use Microsoft's byzantine libraries, and then reverse-engineering them when they don't do what you expect or what the documentation says. Of course, one could argue it's always been like that, but 10 years ago, it was possible to rewrite and/or extend most of MFC into something really slick and way easier and faster to use. I know because I did it. Nowadays, I would dread having to wade into the enormous amount of stuff involved in Windows programming... whether it's good or bad, it's massive and complicated, and those are two things I can't abide.
Re:You are Micro Focus (Score:3, Interesting)
By the time she made this decision to write a parser for English, there were plenty of people who could have told her it was a bad idea.
Trouble is, there were also approximately the same number of people who thought it'd be the best thing ever. The entire idea behind "english" based languages is that they'd supposedly be simple to teach to non-engineers. The aim with COBOL was not to make the life of highly technically literate software engineers easier, it was to enable ordinary business analysts and accountants to become software engineers.
As it turns out, this notion was entirely too optimistic. Business analysts and accountants aren't generally capable of writing their own applications because they don't have an adequate education and/or talent for understanding the basic logic of how computers follow instructions, not because the symbology was unfamiliar. People pick up symbology pretty easily--- it's the syntax that they have trouble grokking--- but this was not readily apparent in a time when the number of computer programmers in the US could conceivably all attend a convention and be seated in a single hall.
COBOL was just an early and misguided attempt to bring computation to the "regular people". It simply turned out to be cheaper and easier to teach programmers business processes than to teach business process folks programming.