Borland is abandoning its two-year-old strategy of delivering a "software development platform" to further the goal of "software delivery optimization." As I feared from the start, Borland's over-stuffed product portfolio and large ambitions clashed with their limited resources.

To summarize: Borland was once the most loved brand in the programming world. They squandered that in order to become second-tier players in various other niches: first they were a second-tier Oracle, then they were a second-tier Weblogic, and most recently they attempted to become a second-tier Rational. As part of that strategy, they decided that what would be brilliant would be to jettison the pesky remnants of the only things they ever did well, which were IDEs and compilers.

I can't wait to hear what they're going to do next. My guess is some sort of second-tier MySpace for Software Development.