The rise and fall of Borland

I have almost forgotten Borland if not the recent news about it being acquired by UK based Micro Focus for $75 million.

If you have been doing computer programming, especially since the 80's or 90's, there is a very high possibility that you used Borland's product before.

During the good-old DOS time, Borland had been famous with their Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Turbo C++, SideKick, etc. When the Windows time come, Borland continued their popularity with Borland C++, Delphi, C# Builder, JBuilder, etc. They also produced software development tools for Linux, such as Kylix.

Beside being famous in programming tools, Borland had also been the company behind some office productivity products such as Paradox (vs MS Access), Quattro Pro (vs MS Excel), WordPerfect (vs MS Word). They had made attempt to combine these 3 products into Borland Office as rival to Microsoft Office. Later, this office productivity business was sold to Novell in the mid-90's.

During their time of glory, Borland also bought over Ashton-Tate, the company behind the once very famous database software -- dBase & Interbase.

Over the year, Borland gradually lost ground in their competition with Microsoft. Nowadays, Visual Studio succeed in engulfing their software development tools market, and Borland Office has long lost their market to MS Office.

The name of Borland faded in the 2000's, especially after the departure of their founder Philippe Kahn, and was almost forgotten by many programmers who once developing software with their superb products with nice Integrated Development Environment (IDE), especially during the DOS era.

Philippe continued to bring wonders to the world after his departure from Borland in the mid-90's. He has contributed to wireless devices data synchronization technology, invented the first camera phone, and is currently the CEO of Fullpower Technologies, a company focuses in converging life sciences, wireless technology, accelerometrics, nanotechnology and MotionX solutions.