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The borders in my city were some of the first ones outside of Ann Arbor and, in the 90's, were very well run and had the feel of an independent bookstore. On most Friday or Saturday nights they were a venue for local musicians (acoustic), who set up and played in the cafe area. It became a popular "date night" destination for me and other like-minded people.
This stopped around 2000 and the store became more generic...but it never struck me as being badly run - although I'm sure this varied from store to store. But, yeah, their large DVD and music section was a mistake. Which was too bad in a way - they did have an excellent selection of less common DVDs and DVD sets, many of which I would have liked to buy, but they were too expensive. And not my a little, either - on more than one occasion, I'd think - I'd like this DVD series; it's $30 on Amazon, but I'd like it now, so I'll pay $40 and get it at Borders now. Only to go to Borders and discover that it was something like $60.
But I don't think that Border's is really any sort of parable about corporate greed. Both Borders and B&N expanded explosively in the late 80's and 90's. This made perfect sense at the time, and they basically crushed all before them. (And there were hundreds of articles written at the time about how this was Bad For Authors and heralded the Death of Books - pretty much in the same way that Amazon is discussed today). In retrospect, they both overexpanded, but it was hard to tell this at the time, and it was also hard to predict that Amazon would become what it did.
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