© Michael Lopp 2021
M. LoppManaging Humanshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7116-2_33

33. Hacking Is Important

Encouraging disruptive acts
Michael Lopp1  
(1)
Los Gatos, CA, USA
 

Back in the early 1990s, Borland International was the place to be an engineer. Coming off the purchase of Ashton-Tate, Borland was the third-largest software company, but, more importantly, it was a legitimate competitor of Microsoft. Philippe Kahn, the CEO at the time, was fond of motorcycles, saxophones, and brash statements at all-hands meetings: “We’re barbarians, not bureaucrats!”

At the time, Kahn was not only navigating the integration of Ashton-Tate, he was in the midst of moving the product suite from DOS to Windows. All the products were complete object-oriented ...

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