Borland R.I.P.

I missed the news of Micro Focus' purchase of Borland until I was reading this week's printed copy of InformationWeek, which had a short blurb on the acquisition. I subsequently found (courtesy of a Nigel Walsh FriendFeed item) a CIO opinion piece. Excerpt:

[T]aking on Microsoft proved to be a suicide mission and, in particular, the venture to create an application prodicutivity suite to compete with Microsoft Office was either brave or foolhardy.

When [Philippe] Kahn left the CEO seat, Borland drifted.

More here, including its concluding statement on 20th century firms:

With Sun Microsystems also selling out, Lotus long gone to IBM and Novell a pale shadow of its early 1990s incarnation, the old guard of client/server is disappearing fast.

Or emerging elsewhere. Kahn, for example, now heads Fullpower Technologies, Inc.