Re: Microsoft to buy Borland

From: Steve Tyrakowski (steve_at_sct-associates.com)
Date: 04/05/04 

Date: Mon, 05 Apr 2004 12:50:14 CDT

In article <40719400@newsgroups.borland.com>, Richard Grossman wrote:
> Absolutely true - Microsoft put more into FoxPro than CA put into
> Clipper (just absorved the cash flow and killed R&D, as per their
> business model of the time)
>
As much as I have a gripe with how CA implemented Visual Objects, they
were really a savior for Clipper, giving it a nice final cleanup before
it was retired. I really doubt that they made any significant money
off of Clipper. They seriously upgraded the documentation, I am
presuming they paid to add a number of 3rd party products, and did some
decent support of user groups. I never really used 5.3 which I got
free as a 3rd party add-on developer, but felt that the Windows
designer on top of a DOS product did not make much sense.

I'd be surprised if they recouped the money they spent on the product,
since Clipper was such a niche and that was right around the time
everyone was jumping to Windows development.

I still am maintaining a couple Clipper apps almost 10 years later
thanks to the very stable 5.2d release. At least they cleaned up the
mess before they walked away from it.

Regards,

Steve Tyrakowski
www.sct-associates.com