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> 1. At peak popularity, Borland products where easily available. Borland decided to turn to enterprise and raised the price considerably, so individuals and small companies started looking elsewhere. By the time they realised the mistake it was too late. In my opinion this was the biggest mistake.

Exactly this. Turbo C was the first real C compiler for DOS that I could afford, where "real" means that it supported large memory model. Before then, the cheap compilers were always stripped down to only allow small model (64K instructions/64K data). Turbo C was also downright fast, and it cost far less than what Microsoft wanted for their compiler. But once we actually started writing 32-bit applications, its day in the sun had already past.

> Internet and Linux came, and with them Perl, PHP, Python and others. Borland missed the boat

Actually, they were looking at new (by then) technologies. C++ Builder was a reality in the late 90s, Kylix (essentially Delphi for Linux) was released in 2000; I attended one demonstration by Marco Cantù himself. The problem with Borland/Inprise/Embarcadero was that they weren't giving a damn about small developers but wanted to play only in the enterprise world, an ill choice that backfired spectacularly. If they could exchange a few ideas with the developers behind Lazarus, and could help them some way but guaranteeing it stays free no strings attached, both worlds could benefit from it. Lazarus needs some more work and a name to become well known outside of the Delphi nostalgic developers world, and newer Delphi and related tools need a much cheaper product to attract developers in long ignored market segment.

> At peak popularity, Borland products where easily available. Borland decided to turn to enterprise and raised the price considerably, so individuals and small companies started looking elsewhere

There is a lot to be said for being easy to get and affordable. I gladly give IntelliJ a couple of hundred dollars a year, because $10-$20 a month for a superior developer experience is worth it to me.

If I was paying their enterprise rate, though ... not a chance.

On the other hand the "we're professional products, you'll eat the cost and like it" approach worked fine for Adobe.

A staggering percentage of Adobe installations in the 90s were pirated, even in the US.

I know. Pirated copies of Adobe Flash Creator created an entire generation of animators. A shame that no real worthy successor has appeared.

My understanding is that was their model.

If you let teenagers pirate your product, they're already familiar with it by the time they get hired. When they get hired, the cost to re-train them on something else is more expensive than the license (at least, in the short term).

That works as long as:

1: someone other than the user is footing the bill (bulk licensing)

2: there are no suitable alternatives

Adobe will fade (or be forced to change) over the next 20 years as different tools pick them apart one niche at a time. It's already happening: the Affinity suite, Procreate (and similar indie-focused tools), and DaVinci Resolve, among others already serve huge niches within the Adobe suite quite well. Capture One, which predates Lightroom, is getting better as it expands out of the portrait studio.

This is essentially what happened to Microsoft. Macs got good (for definitions of good that matter to non-enthusiasts), mobile swept up almost all casual computer usage, and the web took much of the rest by way of Linux and open source. It happened a niche at a time until the world outside was too big to fully EEE.

> On the other hand the "we're professional products, you'll eat the cost and like it" approach worked fine for Adobe.

I know several designers from various areas who do serious attempts to free themselves from Adobe's bondage (in particular the running costs of the forced subscriptions) and are looking for (and partially have found) alternatives for doing their work.

I won't defend Adobe, but Photoshop is (or was) free for students, and I recall a friend buying first licence for 10 dollars or so when I was studying (this was licence only, you had to get the software "somehow"), so at least they are covering this ground. Maybe it's different now.

Yeah, this is it.

BTW, I still moderator in https://www.clubdelphi.com (despite not working on Delphi anymore, like many there!) and see how much mind-share Borland and later lost on the small-bussines/solo-developer side.

You can't imagine how much in the official forums people ask for not ruin it and put real features, and the things that get implemented were so out of touch.

Also, is pretty similar how MS ruin Fox/VB (except not even sell it after): Burn the goodwill in the low-end... in the hope them move to costly products -sql server, ejm- ... and then lost that people to the rising of open source.

The Delphi version we used cost $3000 per developer ~ 2003-2005.