> Anyway, why does answering this help with Borland?
It would be interesting to explore whether or not there are any commonalities in terms of what happened to Sun, Novell, Borland, etc. And if there are, it might be interesting, in turn, to ask if any of those lessons would be useful to contemporary software companies (especially startups, given the audience here at HN).
I suspect that there are some common factors that could be found, but I don't have a good feel for what they are off-hand, aside from falling back on cliches or tautologies.
The common factor would have to be that they were squeezed by both Microsoft and Linux. Sun sold "Enterprise" UNIX until Linux-on-Intel was good enough. Novell sold networking until Windows+AD was good enough (round about the launch of Vista). Borland sold IDEs until free IDEs were good enough, and also traditional client-server dev went out of fashion along with a language migration.
It would be interesting to explore whether or not there are any commonalities in terms of what happened to Sun, Novell, Borland, etc. And if there are, it might be interesting, in turn, to ask if any of those lessons would be useful to contemporary software companies (especially startups, given the audience here at HN).
I suspect that there are some common factors that could be found, but I don't have a good feel for what they are off-hand, aside from falling back on cliches or tautologies.