Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Borland, for one, tried again and again to build a stable of alternatives.
Almost every buggy, and buggy parts, company tried to go into autos, or auto parts, and failed. Studebaker did make a good transition from making wagons to making motor vehicles -- for a few decades. But that measure of success was an unlikely outcome, just as successfully capturing the once shrinking, now growing (partly due to the high Amish birth rate!), market for horse-drawn vehicles and accessories was an unlikely, but possible outcome.
The great majority of new firms fail. If you push your existing firm in a radically new direction, that's pretty much the same as creating a new firm, and you'll probably fail (See: Nook). |
Borland's issue was that when IBM paid them to write an IDE for the OS/2 operating system, they sunk too much of their resources into that and let themselves get overtaken by Microsoft in the Windows IDE category. Borland's focus on OS/2 caused several of their products to be late to market, something they never really recovered from.
The other thing to keep in mind is that Borland feasted on having low cost, well written IDE's that competed well against the massively expensive Microsoft developer's kit (which cost $1000 back in 1990, when I bought one). Once Microsoft started to react to the competition and stopped treating developers as a captive audience to be fleeced, they put Borland behind the 8 ball, since Microsoft could bring developer's kits to market for each new version of Windows much faster than Borland could. Once Borland went belly up, Microsoft reverted back to the extremely high priced developer's kits. When I finally dropped out of Windows development the SDK was back up around $1000.