Borland software upgrades

TRX
February 4, 2015 at 5:34 AM

> giving it away

I bought into Turbo Pascal in the mid-80s at v3. I knew it was incredibly cheap at the time... but the upgrades sure weren't.

I finally balked at... 6.0, I think it was. Borland was running giant ads in the magazines, offering to "upgrade" users of Microsoft's products to Turbo... for substantially less than they wanted for their own users to upgrade.

That went down very hard - hard enough that I never bought another Borland product again. A later employer paid for a copy of Delphi, but the upgrade and tiered pricing structure were too much to justify to the people who signed checks.

Yeah, I could totally see Borland bending their customers over while giving away the same stuff for free. That was almost twenty years ago and it still ticks me off.