[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.