Microsoft did a lot of bad things over the years, but Borland drove themselves over the cliff on their own. Instead of focusing on developer tools, they wanted to reinvent (and rename) Borland every few years in the 90s.
Bad management, bad decisions, bad products (Delphi 7 was peak). MS had nothing to do with that. And I'm sure Anders made a right move to abandon the sinking ship.
I'm still pissed at Borland for all those bad moves.
It’s very difficult to make money in developer tools. Microsoft could easily squeeze Borland by simply making MSDN tools free. Borland tried to diversify with databases, word processors, and spreadsheets, but Microsoft countered with Office, trying them altogether, and it became the default in every single business. Borland had great technology and was super innovative and I used Turbo C++ and TASM for years. But in the end, they just couldn’t find a cash cow market to keep them afloat.
> It’s very difficult to make money in developer tools.
Just to be clear: we are talking the 90s here. Everybody was charging for developer tools (). MSDN was not free, far from it. From today's viewpoint where every compiler imaginable is free and the tools are better than ever (except there is nothing like Delphi and VCL), the 90s were a heaven for tool makers.
Correct, but Borland didn’t die in the 1990s. That was its heyday. As I said, I used Turbo C++ during that period and I spent good money on it. But the tools commoditized and Microsoft eventually made MSDN basically free in the 2000s (there might have been some nominal charge, but it was low). And that was when Borland eventually got acquired, in 2009.
Borland decided that they should target management instead of the developers as their focal point of product development. They ignored the Web for Delphi and decided that web development front would be covered by JBuilder, a paid and slow evolving product that could not compete against the fast iterating and free Eclipse.
I have actually wrote a few web components by hand in an environment where I didn't want any external dependencies and when that requirement was dropped I really liked how easy was to convert them to LitElement (and how much nicer it is to work with them).
I also have embraced the shadow DOM which is a default, but I think it's more trouble than it's worth. Now I use LitElement without shadow DOM and it works great as well.
Same about the shadowDOM. The only criticism I have about Lit is that the creators think shadowDOM is amazing and people not liking it are using it wrong. Lit lacks a good direction and someone with vision leading it but it became the technical pet project of a few.
and then write a program which detects a randomly opened bookmark and closes it because i'm in the middle of something important and can't be bothered right now.
As for European specifically, maybe the commenter was talking about data protection laws. If not, maybe (in many European countries at the moment) less national or business background of ruthlessness.
I was thinking something different: I wonder whether Mozilla considered GitLab or Codeberg, which are the other two I know that are popular with open source projects that don't trust GitHub since it sold out to Microsoft.
(FWIW, Microsoft has been relatively gentle or subtle with GitHub, for whatever reason. Though presumably MS will backstab eventually. And you can debate whether that's already started, such as with pushing "AI" that launders open source software copyrights, and offering to indemnify users for violations. But I'd guess that a project would be pragmatically fine at least near term going with GitHub, though they're not setting a great example.)
You didn't even provide any actual context making it impossible to argue with you. HN should have better conversations than shallow dismissals (according to the guidelines).
You are completely correct, my comment was shallow and that was my fault.
Here is my opinion on Mozilla and their direction: in the previous decade (or a little bit more) or so their primary money bringer was Google, paying for the default search engine placement in Firefox. Annually, that brought about half a billion US (I don't have the exact amounts, but let's assume in that decade they should have earned a few billions).
At the same time, Firefox continuously lost market share and with that, the power to steer the web in the direction of privacy (1) and open standards (2).
(1) instead, they've acquired Anonym, an ad business which touts itself to be interested in user's privacy. color me sceptic on that one.
(2) it's all Chrome and iOS. Firefox is a lagard.
So, what has Mozilla done with the billions? Have they invested it in Firefox? MDN perhaps? Are they the web champions they have been in 2010s?
You can still argue that these points are shallow. My original comment was motivated by my disappointment in Mozilla's lost opportunity to be a fighter for an open web. Instead they have sold their soul to the highest (and only) bidder.
Ok, so we can agree that my assesment is fair, but it remains to be seen how the data protection story pans out.
>> Instead they have sold their soul to the highest (and only) bidder.
> It seems they can't continue doing this, given the ongoing legal actions against Google. So let's see.
Just to be clear: I think that Mozilla should have taken that money (and possibly more) and *invest* in Firefox and build a rainy day fund (which are coming soon). Instead, they spent it on whatevers and done a layoff.
Bad management, bad decisions, bad products (Delphi 7 was peak). MS had nothing to do with that. And I'm sure Anders made a right move to abandon the sinking ship.
I'm still pissed at Borland for all those bad moves.