Microsoft to Buy Rational and/or Borland? 522
oblivious writes "I got this in e-mail this evening: According to a Reuters report that crossed the wires late today, the speculation is that Microsoft will make bids to buy both Rational and Borland. Shares of both Rational and Borland are up on the news, and so far both IBM and Microsoft have no comment on this report." We recently ran a story about IBMs planned purchase of Rational. Chris didn't make clear in here - it's not that Microsoft might buy both, but that Borland might be a likely target, if a bid to buy Rational out from under IBM fails, which it is likely too. Rational and IBM have signed the substantive portion of the agreement already, so any sort of counter bid would have some fun legal consequences for all involved.
Strange (Score:4, Interesting)
Remove the competition... (Score:5, Interesting)
If this is true, they've obviously decided to really flip the bird to the courts...
Re:Strange (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Remove the competition... (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, I'm not real impressed by Clearcase either. But I've never heard of it being so bad that users preferred cvs.
-Paul Komarek
Microsoft The Rampant Purchaser (Score:4, Interesting)
Micro$oft has been on a buying spree recently. Rareware was one of its more recent aquisitions, much to my horror. They had good games; now, I'll avoid them on general principle.
M$ is trying to expand by assimilation. Don't have the tools/knowledge/brains/experience to corner a market? Just buy someone who does! If they don't sell, drive them out of business!
This chain will only end with complete Microsoft control of the world- literally- or M$ gets broken up. The government has to step in and cause the second.
Microsoft's "Buy Or Kill" strategy is, unfortunately, an effective one. Destroy all competition, by taking what they have, if possible; expand to new markets by buying the leader of the industry.
End result? A Microsoft monopoly on almost every technological market.
*whimper*
Re:Hate to say it but.. (Score:5, Interesting)
roughly 5m/quarter for the past 4...
That's 8% net profit margin - now this isn't
Microsoft level profits but it's probably
ethically obtained!
Re:HOLY HELL! : Eclipse! (Score:3, Interesting)
I am a Java programmer myself (laugh it up), but Swing just plain annoys me.
Re:HOLY HELL! (Score:2, Interesting)
Once they bought up Borland they're no longer competing, what would they have to gain by throwing away all that mindshare - thats what they're buying. Thats the only value Borland has to offer.
Re:HOLY HELL! (Score:2, Interesting)
Because now finally people may get off their butt and think about buying other tools. People have become too complacent about the tools they buy. Not to say that JBuilder is bad. But Eclipse, SlickEdit are really good tools that do things in different ways.
I am looking forward to this because it will open the playing field...
Re:HOLY HELL! (Score:2, Interesting)
Seems like that part of the company will be utterly useless to them unless their goal is to stamp out java IDEs. But we already mentioned Eclipse on this thread.
P.S. IANAL
P.P.S. Neither am i anal.
MS, JBuilder, and Sun Case? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm sure if Borland was entertaining an MS offer, other companies would consider buying it knowing that it was up for sale. Oracle, Sun, and IBM are obvious choices, but there are others. I don't think Larry Ellison would mind a true merge of their Java tools, and what better way to stick it to MS than to outdo their
Re:HOLY HELL! (Score:2, Interesting)
If they bought Borland, they'd be buying Borlands liscenses as well, I'd guess.
I imagine Borland would continue to be Borland, and operate under MS as an umbrella corporation.
I don't think the fact that MS has/doesnt have a liscense would affect Borland in an arrangement like this.
I mean tech companies buy other companies for their technology, not just to knock em out of competition (though that's a nice side effect). Eg, bought 3DFX, and eventually incorporated 3DFX's patents and whatnot (stuff like their FSAA routines) into the nv30.
But then I don't really know. Would the purchase price of Borland be less than they lose to them via competition every year?
NOHIALSIRTMI (No one here is a lawyer so its redundant to mention it)
Borland recently bought a competitor to Rational (Score:2, Interesting)
I've often wondered when MS was going to step it up and take over the SCM world, maybe this is the first volley?
M$ did it again (Score:2, Interesting)
Is this not ilegal?
I still remember the news "Netscape X Explorer" and the end of the history too.
And now the fight is Delphi X VB, well it seams the M$ found a different way to solve its problmes.
This Sux! (Score:2, Interesting)
P.S. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:HOLY HELL! (Score:3, Interesting)
The original Borland marketing philosophy was to sell Turbo Pascal for $39.95 when everybody else was selling compilers for $500 or more.
I agree, they started getting into trouble when they decided they could sell Delphi or Java tools for $5k and abandoned their early philosophy of low-priced quality tools for everyone. Their new strategy seems to be "How much are people willing to pay to not use Microsoft?"
M$ using financial markets as a club (Score:3, Interesting)
M$ doesn't care to own either of the companies. I belive they're driving up the cost of the Rational acquisition for IBM by floating rumors that they're goign to jump into the mix. The Boreland rumor adds some credibility to the rumor of a M$ bid for Rational because it looks like M$ has a backup plan. In reality they'll drive the price of Rational up, let IBM pay big bucks for it, and then announce or leak that Boreland just wasn't worth acquiring thereby devaluing the Boreland stock.
And yes... I do believe that the Unmarked Black Helicopters run Palladium.
Re:Smart move on MS' part (Score:3, Interesting)
MS is setting up Visio as their UML modelling tool. We've found it to be more stable than Rose, even if it has fewer features. I wouldn't worry about that.
I was questioning why MS would want Borland at all, and then I see that Borland recently bought Starbase.
Starbase makes a reasonably decent SCM called StarTeam, and a Requirements Management piece called CaliberRM. Those are two areas that Microsoft needs some help in.
But I still don't see it, I think Microsoft's best interests are served with a partnership with Borland... so they remain as a competitor. Borland has committed to
Borland's History (Score:1, Interesting)
You're probably asking yourself, "How did Borland shoot themselves? Isn't this a situation ripe for Microsoft to knock Borland with a kidney punch?" Um, no. Borland used a class framework known as OWL I. Microsoft had MFC 1.0. MFC basically sucked because there wasn't anything there worth using but there was one quality missing from OWL which existed in MFC: upward compatibility. When OWL II came out, all of the marketplace which developed OWL I-based code was either going to upgrade [manually] to OWL-II (Borland had a conversion tool but it sucked and essentially didn't work), stay put, or take some time to reevaluate the market. Most firms took the latter option. Within a year or two, Borland was diving in the C++ market because they had nothing to compete with. That takes care of bullet #1.
Bullet #2: dBase. In the early 90s, Borland purchased Ashton-Tate for a single purpose: dBase. dBase (and compatible clones) ruled the desktop world. With Windows 3.0 (and 3.1 in May 1992) looking to put a stranglehold on the desktop, Borland decided to get dBase, create dBase for Windows, and watch the $$$ roll in. They purchased Ashton-Tate, shut down the other products (making a lot of customers their best friends), and started spinning their wheels. In the meantime, Microsoft is working on the second phase of Access for Windows. (there was a pathetic first pass a few years earlier) Microsoft puts Access for Windows on sale in November 1992 for $99. Even if it becomes shelfware, for $99, no one could afford to pass it up. Everyone's developing all of these nifty little Access applications while Borland's limping around with a bullet hole in one foot, take aim at the other foot, and trying to write code, all at the same time. By the time dBase for Windows comes out, there's no room in the market for it. BANG! Bullet #2. Now Borland has to decide what to do next: find another product market, grow another foot to shoot at, count the stars in the sky, or watch the clouds go by.
So this ends our session of "Why Does Borland Limp?"
Borland undervalued and underrated... (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, if you could get past the CEO egos, a combined Sun/Oracle/Borland could be an instant IBM and Microsoft "killer". They would have the hardware from desktop on up that could be supplemented with x86 hardware, the enterprise backend software (J2EE, Oracle, etc), some of the best development tools around (Delpi/Kylix for Linux/Solaris, JBuilder, CBuilder, etc), and an Office suite to boot.
Their corporate cultures seem to be compatible, from what I know of them (not much, directly, but based on years of reading). I don't see anything compatible between Microsoft and Borland, however.
Re:C++ Builder (Score:1, Interesting)
As an IDE/RAD C++Builder kicks VisualC++'s arse.
Kylix will be killed off, being for UNIX, and especially the free Linux version. So that pretty much gets rid of Delphi as a language altogether.
I guess we don't really need bcp5 as we already have gcc and intelcpp....
This is so typically M$, I'm ready to give up C++ programming on Windows if they get rid of C++Builder, might as well give up GUI-based C++ too if they get rid of Kylix - wxWindows/Qt etc. are too dificult and need commercial frontends to make them usable.
I wonder how long it'll be before we start seeing VisualStudio working like Kylix?
Re:HOLY HELL! (Score:4, Interesting)
They essentially did resurrect Visual J++ by morphing Java to work with the
Microsoft is afraid of losing their visual modeling partner. The bad part is that Borland's new modeling solution TogetherJ doesn't support the Microsoft platform. Rational's XDE does. If IBM gets Rational, Microsoft loses it's status with Rational as a first class platform, and Borland would be something of a consolation prize. I doubt that Microsoft would want to buy Borland because it would probably take less development resources to make Visio into a decent UML modeling tool than it would to make Together support their platform. Also, if I'm not mistaken TogetherJ is written in Java, a cardinal MS no-no.
Re:are you sure? (Score:3, Interesting)
Correct, but I forgot that we always ran ANALYZE.EXE before backups, causing the backups to "fail", which is what I should have said...
Divide and Conquer - the oldest trick in the book (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Who need Borland or Rational? (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed, but what makes Delphi so unique and special isn't so much the IDE (though the IDE is excellent), it's the compiler.
Delphi is fast. I mean, really fast. No other compiler comes close. To put things in perspective, when Borland first added multiple error reporting to the compiler (ie one compile would report more than one error) I didn't understand why they did it. I hadn't seen javac at that point. I didn't understand, because it was actually faster for me to press Ctrl-f9 to trigger a recompile in order to move to the next error, than it was to move my hands from the keyboard to the mouse and back again.
Their compiler is that fast. It can do a project with over 100,000 lines of code I have sitting here in less than 8 seconds. The resultant binaries are tight. When I tried my first C++ program, I was astonished at how long it took to compile as it read in all the headers etc. I was sure I must have done something wrong.
Part of the reason it's so fast is just long history, Borland have had a lot of time to optimize it, but the other was the language design. Object Pascal is designed for fast compiles. For instance, it doesn't use headers, but each compiled unit (.dcu -> .o) included header information with it, meaning it's insanely fast to link them together. It also has excellent remake logic, if you only touched one file, only one file was recompiled. There is no [preprocessor, so the compiler can be single pass.
Firebird / interbase? (Score:1, Interesting)