Borland's product was more powerful than and could also be run on older computers with smaller memories. The company hoped to convince corporate customers to buy Quattro-Pro rather than a Lotus upgrade.
To persuade them further, Borland introduced an extremely aggressive pricing strategy, as it had earlier done with its Paradox program.
In addition, Borland introduced a novel marketing concept, selling its mainstream business products through direct mail campaigns, which kept the costs attributed to dealers or other middlemen low or nonexistent. Following these moves, late in , Borland sold stock to investors in the United States for the first time.
By June Borland had sold more than , copies of its Quattro-Pro spreadsheet program, and the company had started to make real progress in eroding the market share of giant Lotus, some of whose programs were plagued by bugs and glitches. One study reported that sales of Quattro-Pro were matching those of one Lotus version, as Borland won converts in small- and medium-sized companies.
In July the success of Borland's introduction of Quattro-Pro prompted a law suit from its intended target, Lotus. Charging that Borland had infringed its copyright on its software, Lotus sought to make the company alter its product, which accounted for 15 percent of company revenues. As a countermove, Borland sued Lotus in California, hoping to get a favorable judgment.
The possibility that Borland would lose this suit cast a shadow over the company's future as the case wended its way laboriously through the courts. By the end of , Borland's Quattro-Pro shipments had reached 50, a month, and the company attained a market share of about 20 percent. In addition, sales of the company's Paradox database program had also improved, doubling to about 20 percent of the market.
Ashton-Tate's primary product was dBase, a database program that had once dominated the market but had started to lose ground after the company introduced a version of the program riddled with flaws.
With the purchase of Ashton-Tate, Borland became the industry leader in database software and one of the top five personal computer software firms overall. To make its acquisition profitable, Borland moved quickly to bring its own stream-lined management style to the less efficient Ashton-Tate, cutting costs by cutting employees. These measures proved expensive, and Borland was forced to take a charge against its earnings to counteract them.
In addition, Borland's purchase of Ashton-Tate brought the company face to face with the integration of two incompatible software programs, because the two companies' offerings could not interact.
Having bought its way into the big-time with its purchases of the makers of Paradox and dBase, Borland saw programs for use with the Windows operating system as the next big opportunity in the software field. In July of , Borland suffered a legal setback when a Massachusetts judge ruled in its long-standing copyright infringement dispute with Lotus that it had illegally copied part of the larger company's program.
Anxious to take the case to an appeals court, where it believed it would receive a more sympathetic hearing, Borland announced in August that it had removed the feature in question from its Quattro-Pro product.
In September Borland began offering Quattro-Pro software adapted for Windows at a reduced rate with its older spreadsheet program, as the company attempted to address customer concerns about the economics of switching between programs.
In its database business, Borland's share of the market, which had grown to 65 percent, began to be eroded by the company's postponement of its introduction of Windows versions of Paradox and dBase and by low-priced products introduced by such competitors as Microsoft. The company planned to consolidate research and development activities in order to control costs.
In an effort to return to profitability in , Borland introduced a new version of its dBase product, which nevertheless was not adapted for use with Windows. With a decade of striking growth behind it, Borland faced a broad array of new challenges as it peered into the future of the software industry.
UK ; Borland International S. James Press, As consumers, we often take for granted all the hard work that goes into building a great company. We see them around but we don't know what goes on behind the scenes. It is entirely possible even common that a dependent for one target is itself a target. For each target and its dependents, the makefile may also specify the exact sequence of commands needed to build the target.
Below is a simple makefile that shows how to build hello. You can test out make by typing the above into a file called makefile and also put hello. Note white space is significant in a makefile. The first line starts in column one, and the second has a leading tab. Now type make as shown below and see what happens. In reality you would not need a makefile for such a simple example.
However even if the project only has one or two source files a makefile can sometimes be useful. The make command looks for a file in the current directory called "makefile" or "Makefile" and builds the first target listed in the file.
It is possible to call your makefile something else, see make options below. If the makefile contains several targets, you can specify which one you'd like to build on the command line.
Thus the previous example is exactly equivalent to:. Make is smart in that it only builds things if it needs to. If hello. If only some of the dependents are newer, only they will get re-compiled. You can appreciate this feature when you consider that some commercial software projects consist of over source files and only 25 of them may have changed since the last time the target was built.
Even on modern PCs it can take a lot of time to compile source files! Make will keep track of which object files are out of date with respect to their source files and only re-compile those. Another nice feature of make is that it comes configured for many common situations. To build foo. Just enter the command " make foo. A complete working but simple makefile for a voicemail project is shown below. If this example makes sense to you, you can skip the remaining sections of this document, which describe make and makefiles in more detail.
Make can be used with many options specified on the command line. For example entering the command " make -n target " won't actually build anything. Instead this option causes make to print out the commands it would run had you not specified the -n option when building target. This is useful for determining which files and directories make will use when installing something.
To name your makefile something interesting such as foo. Makefiles are at the heart of all project files today. For instance, Borland projects, Symantic Cafe projects, and MS Visual Studio projects simply provide GUI interfaces for a project's makefile, although sometimes extra information is kept in a project file as well.
In fact most of these systems have a menu command to write out the makefile which you can then easily look at with any text editor such as NotePad. Unix, Linux, Windows, and Macintosh systems today usually come with a stand-alone make utility already.
If your system does not you can easily find and download one from the Internet. The GNU project also contains a popular free make program as well as additional developer tools. There are many versions of make floating around these days, including the original make, Gnu's gmake, imake, nmake MS provides this with Windows , and others. Fortunately the basic makefile syntax is the same for all of them. However there are some differences, so you should read the documentation on the version of make you are using before creating complex makefiles.
The makefile syntax discussed here should be common to nearly all versions of make. In Micro Focus acquired Borland, and continues to support the needs of software teams who must rapidly adapt to the increasing volume and velocity of evolving business requirements.
Unify test management to drive reuse and efficiency and ensure control over application readiness. Universe Solve your digital dilemma. Register now. Borland is now part of Micro Focus Find products and support info below. Contact us. Borland History Founded in , Borland has helped thousands of organizations improve and automate their software development capabilities. Borland Products Requirements Management.
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