Comment by StevePerkins
4 years ago
They weren't able to compete with those things in the early-2000's, yet JetBrains was founded in 2000 and has had nothing but growth and success ever since.
The quality of leadership at Borland fell off, and the organization lost its vision and ability to execute. Simple as that.
I suspect JetBrains location in Eastern Europe helped a great deal talent-wise.
Maybe, but I really doubt it. "Our developers are cheaper" is rarely a winning strategy.
JetBrains did - and still does - execute well. They expanded their IDE to many languages and caught the Ruby, Node, and Typescript waves. Borland did JBuilder, yes, but it wasn't category-winning. Maybe Delphi could have dominated with more investment and more imagination, but it seems to have risen and fallen with Win32.
Their pricing strategy always sucked. I mean, 4000 Bucks for a Java IDE? Jetbrains on the other hand did the right thing from the beginning by asking money but keeping the price realistic.
If I recall Borland had very strong team in Saint Petersburg that moved entirely to JB