[pjmlp]

Back in the 90's Borland seemed to have no match for developer tools, then their management went astray.

And to be honest I never understood the complaint about lack of quality of their documentation vs what Microsoft, Zortech, Watcom, Nantucket and others used to have on those days.

Currently JetBrains is segmenting their products, for example native code languages are only supported in Clion/AppCode, even if you buy Ultimate, one needs to buy two IDEs from them to debug Kotlin/Native.

So lets see how long their management keeps on the right track.

Personally I don't care, because my experience with Borland has made me only use IDEs that are produced from the same companies as the OS SDKs that I use.

[Too]

Jetbrains product segmenting is a bit strange yes. Right now as a full stack developer i have three options: 1. One instance of VSCode with a few plug ins for each language, 2. IntelliJ ultimate €499/year/seat, 3. Run four free IDEs from jetbrains simultaneously.

#2 is too expensive, #3 is too inconvenient and while #1 isn't as good as jetbrains it's too good enough to justify an upgrade to intellij ultimate. If you are saying native is not even supported in Ultimate this makes things even worse. Jetbrains should release something cheaper in between #2 and #3 that supports many languages but maybe hold back on certain premium features like profiling etc.

[pvg]

then their management went astray.

That, and Microsoft actively worked to kill them. I don't think JetBrains position is nearly as precarious.

[pjmlp]

HN loves to hate Microsoft, but they haven't anything to do with Imprise and CodeGear, nor with the internal management issues.

Yes, Anders and a few others eventually moved into Microsoft, but that was a side effect of how bad things were at Borland. Anders refused the offer multiple times from previous team mates that went to Microsoft before he did, until he though that was time to finally leave Borland.

Check this interview.

https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-c...

[pvg]

HN loves to hate Microsoft

It'd be nice if you saved this stuff for when you're replying to HN, not to me.

Microsoft in the 80s and 90s were hyper-aggressive towards anyone they considered a key competitor and played dirty. The fact that some of these competitors didn't do themselves any favours doesn't change that (I think, quite uncontroversial) fact.

I don't think VS Code is this huge threat to Jetbrains and as a competitor, Microsoft is not quite the bugbear it once was. If anything, its Jetbrains that's outcompeted their direct competitors (Eclipse, Netbeans) to semi-irrelevance/coma.

[pjmlp]

Quick Pascal, Quick Basic, MASM, Microsoft C and the 16 bit versions of Visual C++ were hardly hyper-aggressive products, versus the competition.

They were aggressive with MS-DOS and Windows, their developer tools not really, even with VB and VC++ 32, they started to win when Watcom, Borland, CA, Zortech, Symantec Metrowerks stopped being worthwhile to spend money on.

[pvg]

We're getting a bit into the weeds here but I think it's a mistake to conflate the 'aggression' part of this with the quality of the products. In fact, the poor quality of the products was part of the aggression - Microsoft got to leverage its position as the platform vendor against its own ISVs. They even named them with Borland's own naming scheme!

You can probably make a decent argument that Borland's mismanagement was a misguided attempt to respond to Microsoft's pressure.