Borland was taken over by managers and did themselves in:
- bought DBase for WAY too much money when flat files DB were on the way out.
- spent lavishly on a new HQ in Mountain View
- renamed themselves to the pompous name of "Inprise"
- suddenly jacked up the price of all their packages so high that their natural user base started looking elsewhere, rather than trying to convince their boss to pay for licences.
...And then came the web, for which they had no product to sell.
Microsoft was only happy to help their downfall by poaching and copying.
As much as I hate Microsoft, I'm not sure that's entirely fair. Borland held the Pascal crown with Turbo Pascal. They introduced Turbo C, but IIRC it never really had the success of Turbo Pascal. Borland was known as the Pascal company, not the C company.
Meanwhile, Microsoft C, the big version, was what everyone used to develop Windows programs in C. It was on the expensive side, like a few hundred bucks I think.
Microsoft came out with Quick Pascal and Quick C, to complement their very-successful QuickBasic product. Quick C was more successful than Borland's Turbo C because Quick C was a hobbyist version of Microsoft C for $99. Microsoft was the C company, Borland was the Pascal company. And C won that argument, not Pascal.
Now it could be said that Microsoft had an advantage because it was easier for them to make Quick C compatible with Microsoft C than it was for Borland to make Turbo C exactly compatible with Microsoft C, especially when all Microsoft had to do was change their C features all the time to keep Borland always playing catch-up.
What MS did to Borland was exactly what they did with Netscape 10 years later: use their dominance of the OS to displace competitors in other areas. The only difference is that computing was a much smaller part of the economy at the time. Things changed with Netscape and other multi-billion dollar web companies, so the government decided to act.
The big difference to me is that with Netscape, Microsoft distributed a free Internet Explorer with Windows just when Netscape was trying to monetize their software. In the case of Borland, Microsoft wasn't distributing free C compilers to compete with Borland's paid compilers.
I think the government decided to act because in the case of the browser, they bundled it with Windows, for free, to kill a competitor. But I agree, having Windows on nearly every desktop in the world gives them a way to launch new products that no other software company enjoys, even to this day, except maybe Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.
