Information Technology Reference
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hear the case. The eight justices tied 4 to 4 in their decision, which left the original
decision intact. Having a tied decision in a Supreme Court case is extremely rare.
In the late 1990s, Borland had declining sales and some issues with products
that were aging and hard to port to Windows. It tried to compete with Microsoft
Office by partnering with WordPerfect, but that was not a success.
Borland also attempted, with some success, to build software development en-
vironments with products such as JBuilder and Delphi. However, the open-source
subindustry targeted the same field with free products such as Eclipse, and these
were much more successful.
Borland also tried application life cycle management (ALM), but while it had
strong pieces such as StarTeam, Caliber, and Segue (which was a test tool suite),
the integration of the pieces was spotty. In the meantime, IBM Rational, Microsoft
VSTS, and HP Mercury arrived to compete in the same space.
Between its revenue peak in the early 2000s and its final acquisition by Micro
Focus, Borland experienced a string of revenue and earning losses and seemed to
have no strategy to turn things around (or at least not one that worked).
After several changes of CEOs and still more changes of direction, Borland
decided to move toward enterprise applications rather than personal applications.
This led to an ill-conceived name change from Borland to Inprise. The name
change was not a success. Nobody knew what Inprise did because the name was
unknown, and many people thought Borland had gone out of business when it
stopped being mentioned in ads. In 2001, the company became Borland again.
After a number of different direction and management changes that are very
complex, Borland was finally acquired by Micro Focus in 2009. The price was
about $1.50 per share, or $75 million.
The history of Borland is a cautionary tale for software entrepreneurs.
Changing business direction is hard to do successfully. Changing business direc-
tion almost every year confuses customers, investors, and employees. A rapid se-
quence of acquisitions and divestitures also makes it hard to have a solid core busi-
ness.
In retrospect, if Borland had continued to grow its language products and per-
sonal assistant products, it might have continued to grow. Attempting to com-
pete with Microsoft in the office suite world and getting into the database market
without really understanding it was not a path to success. Changing executives and
business plans so often that it is hard to keep track of them is also troubling.
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