Borland Software: Back in the Black

The question was, Could Fuller fix the company's problems fast enough to save it? Without a team of his own, Fuller crafted a strategy for short-term triage and a longer-term plan that would kick in if the company in fact survived. His first move was to take hold of the financial reins of the company, instructing his staff to hand over every purchase order for more than $2. "You couldn't buy a pen without me signing for it," he says.

The exercise revealed a culture where even the dumbest spending went unquestioned. There was, for example, the $100,000 annual tab for chemicals to keep the campus pond safe for aquatic life. Trouble was, there hadn't been fish in the pond since 1992. Raccoons had eaten them all.

While stanching the flow of red ink, Fuller also had to come up with a product strategy -- and fast. The previous management team had steered the company away from its core strength in developer tools toward a plan for creating so-called enterprise middleware, a strategy that not only alienated the company's 3 million loyal customers, but also positioned it to be steamrollered by behemoths like IBM and BEA Systems.

Fuller, who had built and sold an Internet company called WhoWhere? to Lycos, knew that the future of computing was moving from the desktop to the network. Companies that could create applications for a range of Internet and wireless devices were likely to thrive. Fortuitously, Borland had created some of the original development tools for distributed computing. "The competitive competency was in the house, but nobody could see what was right in front of their faces," Fuller says. "It took somebody from the outside to do that."

In an all-hands meeting, Fuller told the company's 1,100 employees where they were heading. "I said, 'If you're working on a project that's not focused on the Net, you'd better figure out how to get it there quick, because over the next three months, I'm going to kill everything that isn't focused on the Net.' " With a clear direction that built on the company's longtime strengths, the developers, who had continued plugging along through all of the management turmoil, were energized.

Things weren't quite so merry, however, among the sales, marketing, and management teams. They had seen five different CEOs come and go in the preceding three years and assumed that Fuller was the latest in a series of short-term custodians. Rather than embrace the new direction, they figured that they'd just wait Fuller out. Fuller had other ideas.

Within six months, he fired about 400 people, including 60 of his top managers. But attracting fresh talent to fill those positions was no slam dunk. It was, after all, the height of the dotcom boom. Coming to Inprise, a company with the whiff of death about it, was widely perceived as a career-ending move. "The thing that scared me most when I arrived in 1999 was our inability to hire good people," Ball says. "It almost killed the company."

Fuller knew that he needed to make a dramatic move to signal that the company was still viable. So he went to Redmond to visit his company's arch rival. Fuller gave Microsoft two options: Pay Inprise $100 million for rights to use the company's patented technology in Microsoft products, or prepare to be sued for patent violations. And, he added, it would be nice if Microsoft purchased $25 million of Inprise stock, as a good-faith gesture. Microsoft, which was mired in the Justice Department's antitrust suit, wanted to avoid another legal hassle. Fuller headed back to Scotts Valley with a hefty check.

With $125 million in the bank, Fuller and Ball started building for the future. They launched a series of brutal meetings with staff. Every morning, Fuller, Ball, and a consultant would meet at 5:30 AM to recap the previous day's events and map an agenda for the day ahead. Then they would meet with the company's top 30 managers at 7 AM to outline the day's tasks. "It was excruciatingly painful," Fuller says. "It was 14 hours every day for 9 months." But slowly, the company began to get some traction.

In March 2000, the company actually turned a profit. Inprise was lean, it had a bunch of products in the pipeline, and it had a decent amount of money in the bank. In the spring of that year, Fuller brokered a deal to sell the firm to Corel for $1.1 billion in stock. But by May, when the sale was scheduled to be finalized, Corel reported an unexpected loss. Its plummeting stock price sliced the value of the deal by two-thirds. The board voted to scrap the deal.

"That was a bleak day for Corel but a great one for Inprise," says Shelton. That vote signaled the start of the company's next challenge: to effect an enduring turnaround and build a prosperous future. "Dale and Fred had managed to right the ship," Shelton continues. "Over the next two years, we had to bring the company back to being one of the foremost technology companies in the world."