Crappy features - features that developers didn't want and didn't need. Management driven? The headline features on every release were just rubbish that you didn't care about or never used - very few headline features held up over time. This started in Turbo Pascal days - remember OWL?
Of course they were struggling to compete with Gorilla Microsoft, but Delphi had a huge community, commercial components, and most components were source available (C# was wayyyy behind on that I thought).
Borland fucked up, and after that it was dead and sold. 64-bit super was released years late, and the IDE still ran 32-bit (slow and crashy on high-end machines).
I would summarise it as lack of 'taste' for what developers want. Microsoft later followed the same path: Microsoft had the intense love of many developers but has squandered that love over the years. Balmer's "developers, developers, developers" rant was actually brilliant (a perhaps is why it is so memorable).
Of course they were struggling to compete with Gorilla Microsoft, but Delphi had a huge community, commercial components, and most components were source available (C# was wayyyy behind on that I thought).
Borland fucked up, and after that it was dead and sold. 64-bit super was released years late, and the IDE still ran 32-bit (slow and crashy on high-end machines).
I would summarise it as lack of 'taste' for what developers want. Microsoft later followed the same path: Microsoft had the intense love of many developers but has squandered that love over the years. Balmer's "developers, developers, developers" rant was actually brilliant (a perhaps is why it is so memorable).