The downfall of Borland started long before Kylix.
Around 1996-1997 is when you had early signs of things going awry, when Borland tried to rebrand as an "enterprise middleware" company focused on what they called a three-tier architecture, with COM/CORBA clients talking to server middleware and databases. They bought a CORBA company called Visigenic at a time when CORBA was arguably already old hat, while also betting on COM and Microsoft Transaction Server. They were trying to get into the same enterprise space as Microsoft and Oracle, but then the web arrived and everything started moving away from desktop apps. I don't think they had the enterprise DNA as an organization, and renaming Borland to Inprise couldn't magically fix that.
It arguably started long before then. Borland had a messy history of spreading themselves too thin, trying to do too much, constantly betting on the wrong horse, and ultimately never really finding their feet. Buying Ashton-Taste to buy the already-antique dBASE strained the company, and they went off on weird wild goose chases like Borland Office when WordPerfect was already dying, and they missed the web revolution with the whole Inprise thing. They might have survived if they shed some weight and laser-focused on development tools like Delphi, but a lot of the company seemed to have been pulling in multiple directions.
LOL .NET was absolutely chock full of ex-Borland people. They laid off just a ton of people in some late 90s pre-dotcom downturn. Indiscriminately I assume because a lot of them went on to be very prominent at MS and especially in .NET. My first director as a new software engineer in MS VC++ had been 'accidentally' laid off by Borland. Apparently they tried to hit the undo button the next day but he'd already been hired by MS, so Borland fired his manager. I guess that's one way of reducing headcount.
Back in 2005, CORBA was still pretty much the foundation of Nokia Networks products, no idea where they went to nowadays.
And to this day COM's stronghold on Windows APIs only increased, as the Windows team is very much anti-.NET, most Win32 C APIs are from Windows XP days.
Agree on the other Borland stuff, I was a mostly happy customer starting with Turbo Basic 1.0, Turbo Pascal 4.4, Turbo C 2.0 and Turbo C++ 1.0, until 2000's, using most versions of their products.
My point was that not that Borland-as-Inprise failed because of COM/CORBA, but because the attempt to get into the enterprise application server space.
Early Java-based applications servers like iPlanet, NetDynamics, and WebLogic all did CORBA, but they fit into the shift to the web, and that wasn't where Borland were going. In fact, I don't think they had any web tech at all aside from Borland Enterprise Server, which was another J2EE thing competing in the same space.
Around 1996-1997 is when you had early signs of things going awry, when Borland tried to rebrand as an "enterprise middleware" company focused on what they called a three-tier architecture, with COM/CORBA clients talking to server middleware and databases. They bought a CORBA company called Visigenic at a time when CORBA was arguably already old hat, while also betting on COM and Microsoft Transaction Server. They were trying to get into the same enterprise space as Microsoft and Oracle, but then the web arrived and everything started moving away from desktop apps. I don't think they had the enterprise DNA as an organization, and renaming Borland to Inprise couldn't magically fix that.
It arguably started long before then. Borland had a messy history of spreading themselves too thin, trying to do too much, constantly betting on the wrong horse, and ultimately never really finding their feet. Buying Ashton-Taste to buy the already-antique dBASE strained the company, and they went off on weird wild goose chases like Borland Office when WordPerfect was already dying, and they missed the web revolution with the whole Inprise thing. They might have survived if they shed some weight and laser-focused on development tools like Delphi, but a lot of the company seemed to have been pulling in multiple directions.