It was also very distinctly DOS/Windows-first product family. Microsoft OS slide to irrelevance sealed the fate.
> Microsoft OS slide to irrelevance
I wouldn't call 75% of desktop share "irrelevant". Tablets are still 20 times less common than PCs. *
* data from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
But people don’t build desktop applications that much anymore. Windows, macOS, and Linux as GUI platforms have all faded with the Web and smartphones.
It was a huge downgrade in interactive functionality at the time, but the Web has slowly built up over the past two decades so it is almost as functional.
> But people don’t build desktop applications that much anymore.
This might be outside of your echo chamber, but lots of companies still very actively build desktop applications (also completely new ones) for their own line-of-business purposes.
Agree, I should have specified “for the mass market”.
Totally different inside the enterprise, one reason Borland & Embarcadero focused on it.
“Worse is better:”
What happened is the web replaced most native desktop apps, not mobile tablet UIs. There is a reason why web devs are the still the most common type of devs, despite mobile devices being the most common type of device used today by a large mile.
* Their application business lost out to Microsoft many times over the years. (Sidekick, Quattro, Sprint, etc.)
* The availability of free and open source development tools went way up. (This undermined the ability to make money selling development tools, even as they become more expensive to develop.)
* They lost Anders Hejlsberg to Microsoft. (His Microsoft resume is a testimonial to his skills, technical and otherwise, but prior to that he was the driving force for the Turbo Pascal line through Delphi. They did diversify, but Turbo Pascal really was Borland's core asset.)
* Developer mindshare pivoted away from client apps to web apps.