Date: Mon, 07 Aug 2000 21:28:08 -0600 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: Francisco Reyes <fjrm@yahoo.com>, Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: Francisco Reyes <fjrm@yahoo.com>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: www.tucows.com messed up with BSD link Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.2.20000807210442.056ab2a0@localhost> In-Reply-To: <20000807234542.5439.rocketmail@web221.mail.yahoo.com>
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At 05:45 PM 8/7/2000, Francisco Reyes wrote: >The one thing I have never understood is how can a company >so poorly manage have so many good products. > >Also I was very surprised to read that one of the the lead >architects at MS working on C# was one of the lead >architects for Turbo Pascal and Delphi. I am sure MS >offered real big bucks, but for Borland to not have tried >to create an environment (money, stocks, whatever...) for >this person to stay is sad.. > >Or perhaps this person just got tired of working for a >bunch of looser managers/business people. I think it was some of each. The person in question was Anders Hejlsberg, whose Poly Pascal compiler and IDE for the Z80 became Turbo Pascal when Philippe Kahn marketed it in the US. (Contrary to what some magazines have printed, it was Anders -- not Philippe -- who wrote Turbo Pascal.) Anders worked on the compiler for years in his native Denmark and eventually came to the US to work at Borland's headquarters in Scotts Valley. But the company botched its strategy badly, throwing all of its support behind Windows and thereby putting its fate into Microsoft's hands. (Borland didn't realize, though I told their executives repeatedly, that ports of its development tools could empower alternative platforms and give them a real shot at rivaling Microsoft's platforms.) Borland also made bad moves such as the acquisition of Mark of the Unicorn's Final Word (a Gosling EMACS derivative) and of Ashton-Tate. All along, Microsoft preyed on Borland in many ways. It hired away Borland's sharpest employees -- including Brad Silverberg, who doubtless helped them understand how best to hurt Borland once he arrived. It withheld technical documentation and licenses unless Borland dropped potentially competing standards, such as the portable OWL (Object Windows Library). It used a "vaporware" strategy to kill the market for Turbo BASIC (now PowerBasic). In short, it used every trick in the book -- many of them probably not legal -- to damage Borland. In the meantime, Anders continued to work on compilers and fell in love with object-oriented programming. His object-oriented Pascal dialects were full of bells and whistles, and were very powerful; alas, they were also so complex -- more complex than C++! -- that few ever mastered all of their features. When Java came out, Anders wanted to add similar features to Java, but many in the Java community didn't think that the added complexity was worth it. After working for Borland for more than a decade, Hejlsberg found that his stock in the company wasn't worth all that much; it had been crippled by bad strategic decisions and predation by Microsoft. So, when Microsoft offered him a 6-figure bonus plus a chance to extend Java the way he wanted, Hejlsberg jumped ship. His first project was Microsoft's J++ compiler, complete with incompatible extensions. This project has now become C#. It was sad that Hejlsberg decided to go this route rather than working for a promising startup that could give Microsoft a run for its money. As a fan of Borland's technology (though not its boneheaded management), I would much rather have seen Hejlsberg do a leveraged buyout of Borland's language technology and make it successful. But, alas, he sold out for a rather large mess of pottage and a chance to wield some of Microsoft's clout. Personally, I couldn't have lived with myself if I'd done that, but then, I am not Anders. --Brett Glass To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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