[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.