[ryanackley]

No. One man's departure did not bring down Borland. Years after this guy left JBuilder was a great product that made them tons of money in the early 2000s. Java's popularity explosion (think J2EE) came years after the J++ debacle and JBuilder cashed in.

They disappeared because they weren't able to compete with the commoditization of Java IDE's (Eclipse) and Microsoft's integrated sales channel on Windows (Visual Studio). These two things killed their two biggest products.

[randcraw]

Borland staff also disappeared because M$ made them offers that they couldn't refuse. Departing engineers were offered megabucks salaries which lasted only a year or two, but were enough to decimate the ranks of Borland's talent and wipe out the company's skillbase. Of course, Borland wasn't the only competitor to receive this kind of attention from M$.

In the 1999 federal prosecution of M$ for antitrust, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson found that 'Microsoft used its "market power" to unlawfully "maintain its monopoly in the operating system market," violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. Microsoft, the Appeals Court found, unfairly used its monopoly power to strongarm computer manufacturers, Internet access providers, Internet content providers, independent software vendors, and companies like AOL, Apple, Intel, and Sun Microsystems.'

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/07/09/the-microsoft-...

[StevePerkins]

They weren't able to compete with those things in the early-2000's, yet JetBrains was founded in 2000 and has had nothing but growth and success ever since.

The quality of leadership at Borland fell off, and the organization lost its vision and ability to execute. Simple as that.

[mthoms]

I suspect JetBrains location in Eastern Europe helped a great deal talent-wise.

[stickfigure]

Maybe, but I really doubt it. "Our developers are cheaper" is rarely a winning strategy.

JetBrains did - and still does - execute well. They expanded their IDE to many languages and caught the Ruby, Node, and Typescript waves. Borland did JBuilder, yes, but it wasn't category-winning. Maybe Delphi could have dominated with more investment and more imagination, but it seems to have risen and fallen with Win32.

[zeroc8]

Their pricing strategy always sucked. I mean, 4000 Bucks for a Java IDE? Jetbrains on the other hand did the right thing from the beginning by asking money but keeping the price realistic.

[dilyevsky]

If I recall Borland had very strong team in Saint Petersburg that moved entirely to JB

[CRConrad]

> They disappeared because they weren't able to compete with the commoditization of Java IDE's (Eclipse) and Microsoft's integrated sales channel on Windows (Visual Studio).

That, plus their weird and (IMO obviously even at the time) misguided pivot to emphasise SLM systems over dev tools. Well, it may be the same thing: seems likely this pivot was what led to them not being able to keep up with Microsoft on dev tools.