WhereIsAtlas · Software
What Happened to Borland?
Turbo Pascal made it famous, Quattro Pro put it in the Supreme Court, and two sales in 2008 and 2009 finished it. Delphi outlived the company that built it.
Borland was founded in 1983 and became one of the "Big Four" of personal computer software with Turbo Pascal, Sidekick and Quattro Pro. Its spreadsheet business went to Novell in 1994 for $140 million, its developer tools went to Embarcadero Technologies in 2008, and the remaining company was sold to Micro Focus for $75 million in 2009. Borland ceased to exist as an organisation on 5 April 2015, when Micro Focus completed the integration of the Attachmate Group. Delphi, its 1995 development environment, is still sold — by Embarcadero, now a division of Idera.
A company that started as a compromise
Borland's origins are less tidy than the logo suggests. The Danish company — Borland Ltd., founded in August 1981 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen and Mogens Glad — wrote CP/M software, and found that reaching the American market required an American company. That company was formed in 1983 with Philippe Kahn, who had just arrived in Silicon Valley from France, as chairman, president and chief executive [1].
The first product was Turbo Pascal in 1983, written by Anders Hejlsberg. Hejlsberg had built the compiler sold in Scandinavia as Compas Pascal, and Borland acquired it; he went on to lead Delphi, and later became the architect of C# at Microsoft. Sidekick, an early terminate-and-stay-resident utility, followed in 1984 [1].
By the late 1980s Borland was one of four companies that mattered in personal computer software. Forrester Research grouped it with Lotus Development, Ashton-Tate and Microsoft as the "Big Four", and fiscal 1987 revenue of $29.2 million with $4.7 million in pretax earnings was enough to fund an aggressive acquisition strategy — Analytica and Reflex in 1985, Ansa-Software and Paradox in 1987, and Ashton-Tate in 1991 [1].
The merger that hurt more than it helped
Ashton-Tate brought dBASE, then the dominant database product for personal computers, and InterBase. It is usually described as the beginning of Borland's decline, and the reason is specific rather than mysterious: dBASE had no Windows version ready, most of Ashton-Tate's other product lines were discontinued, and consolidating two companies' support and development operations was expensive and disruptive. By the time dBASE for Windows shipped, its developers had moved to Clipper and FoxBase, and Microsoft had bought FoxPro and shipped Access [1].
Borland also tried the suite route. In 1993 it worked with WordPerfect on a bundle called Borland Office for Windows — the WordPerfect word processor, the Quattro Pro spreadsheet and the Paradox database — introduced at that year's Comdex. It never made serious progress against Microsoft Office, and the partnership dissolved when WordPerfect was bought by Novell [1].
The case that went to a tie
Quattro Pro shipped in 1989 and included a mode where its menus imitated those of Lotus 1-2-3, so that users could keep their habits and their macros. No source code was copied; the command names and their arrangement were [2].
Lotus filed suit on 2 July 1990 in the District of Massachusetts. It won at first instance in 1993 — the court reasoned that a different menu structure could have been designed — and Borland removed the Lotus-style menus while keeping the "Key Reader" feature that ran Lotus 1-2-3 macros, which Lotus then challenged too [2].
The First Circuit reversed in 1995 on a different principle: the menu command hierarchy is a "method of operation" and therefore not copyrightable under 17 U.S.C. § 102(b). The court compared it to the buttons on a video recorder — the layout is how the machine is used, and users cannot be asked to relearn it for every program [2].
Lotus petitioned the Supreme Court. Justice John Paul Stevens recused himself, and on 16 January 1996 the eight remaining justices divided evenly. The First Circuit's judgment was affirmed by an equally divided court, which settled the case between these two parties and set no national precedent at all. It is the reason the decision is still cited cautiously and argued over — including in later disputes about software interfaces [2][5].
Lotus, for its part, had already won its cases against Paperback Software and Mosaic, which lost and went out of business. Borland was the one competitor that survived the "look and feel" campaign [5].
Selling the spreadsheet, and then the founder
In October 1994 Borland sold Quattro Pro, plus rights to sell up to a million copies of Paradox, to Novell for $140 million in cash [1]. Novell's own entry in this registry gives the figure as $145 million, and the discrepancy is a reminder that these totals are reported rather than audited in public; the substance is that Borland traded an applications business it could not win for cash to fund the tools business it could.
Novell had bought WordPerfect the same year and was trying to assemble an office suite to challenge Microsoft, under Ray Noorda. The plan failed: Novell's applications business was sold to Corel in 1996, as the Novell entry records [6]. Borland, having sold its spreadsheet, refocused on development tools and the InterBase database engine.
Philippe Kahn resigned as chairman, chief executive and president in January 1995 after twelve years, having disagreed with the board about the company's focus. He stayed on the board until November 1996 [1].
The last genuinely great Borland product arrived that same year. Delphi 1, the rapid application development environment built under Hejlsberg, shipped in 1995 and gave Windows developers a way to build applications visually with an object-oriented version of Pascal. Delphi, C++Builder and RAD Studio are that lineage, and they are the reason the Borland name is still spoken.
Inprise: the name change that convinced customers the company had died
In April 1998 Borland International announced it had become Inprise Corporation. The name — chosen by a branding firm, Lexicon Branding — was meant to evoke "integrating the enterprise", and the strategy behind it was to sell tools and middleware together. What it actually did was confuse the market: according to the company's own history, many customers concluded that Borland had gone out of business [1].
In November 2000 the company said it would change back, and on 2 January 2001 Borland Software Corporation was restored, with the Nasdaq ticker moving from INPR to BORL [1].
The product strategy did not improve. Kylix, the Linux version of Delphi, launched in 2001 and did not build a lasting market. In 2002 Borland bought TogetherSoft and Starbase. By 2007 it had repositioned again around open application life-cycle management and moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas [1].
The two sales that ended it
Borland's final act was to give away the parts that still worked.
On 8 February 2006 the company announced it would divest its integrated development environment division, including Delphi, JBuilder and InterBase, and concentrate on application life-cycle management; it also announced the acquisition of Segue Software. On 14 November 2006 the tools went into a wholly owned subsidiary called CodeGear [1].
On 7 May 2008 Borland announced the sale of CodeGear to Embarcadero Technologies for an expected $23 million, plus $7 million in CodeGear receivables that Borland retained. The deal closed on 30 June 2008 for approximately $24.5 million [1][3]. That is the transaction that saved Delphi: the product changed owners and kept shipping.
The remainder was smaller and less valuable. On 6 May 2009 Borland agreed to be acquired by Micro Focus International for $75 million, or $1.50 a share — a company with $172 million in revenue in 2008 sold for less than half that, with about 750 employees at the time. Shareholders approved on 22 July 2009 and the deal closed the same month [1][4].
Where Borland is now
There is no Borland. On 5 April 2015 Micro Focus announced the completion of its integration of the Attachmate Group, whose merger had closed in November 2014, and confirmed that the Borland products would sit within its own portfolio. Micro Focus was acquired by OpenText in 2023, and the Borland portfolio was absorbed into OpenText's application delivery management division [1].
The parts that mattered are still working somewhere else. Delphi, C++Builder and RAD Studio are sold by Embarcadero, which became a division of Idera, Inc. in October 2015 [3]. InterBase went the same way. Turbo Pascal's descendants live on in the Object Pascal language that Delphi still compiles.
Two things are worth keeping straight about the ending. Borland did not fold because it lost its famous lawsuit — it won that, in the only way an evenly divided Supreme Court allows. It went under because the applications market it tried to take from Lotus and Microsoft belonged to Microsoft, and because the tools market it was actually good at was too small to support a public company of its size.
What Borland's history explains
Borland is the clearest case in this registry of a software company that was defined by one dispute and undone by another. The dispute it is remembered for was with Lotus, over menus, and it ended without a rule. The dispute that actually mattered was with Microsoft, over spreadsheets and databases and office suites, and that one did not need a court: Borland lost it in the market, twice, and sold both times.
The tools it built in the middle of that decline are the reason the name lasted as long as it did. Turbo Pascal and Delphi taught a generation of developers how to write software on a personal computer, and Delphi is still being sold, by a company Borland sold it to, which is owned by someone else again. The corporate history ends in 2015. The software did not.
Entries in this story
Sources
- Borland — Wikipedia (2026-09-20) ↩
- Lotus Development Corp. v. Borland International, Inc. — Wikipedia (2026-09-20) ↩
- Embarcadero Technologies — Wikipedia (2026-09-20) ↩
- Micro Focus buys Borland Software for $75 million — InfoWorld (2026-09-20) ↩
- Lotus Development — Wikipedia (2026-09-20) ↩
- Novell — Wikipedia (2026-09-20) ↩