Microsoft hired a top Borland executive named Paul Gross in the mid 90s. Paul no longer works at Microsoft, but he was one of the guys in charge of dBase back then. I recall in the mid 90s when I was working on the VFP team, I sent him an email that was dBase related and his response was "I should have killed that product a long time ago.". I think he ended up working on Windows and stuff outside of developer tools before he left Microsoft. The other guy that Microsoft hired is Anders Hejlsberg who was the chief designer of Delphi at Borland and then became the chief architect of C# and parts of the .NET architecture. I don't recall Microsoft hiring any of the dBase (BladeRunner) architects, I don't think that was the case.