Re: Cat among the pigeons......

From: John Kaster (Borland) (johnk_at_borland.com)
Date: 07/16/04 

Date: 16 Jul 2004 00:32:03 -0700

zedd in <40f77afa$1@newsgroups.borland.com> wrote:

> Better 100 schools were Delphi is taught than a couple of
> advertisements in a magazine.

First off (I need to say this because of what I'm going to say next),
this is all my opinion. I'm all for increasing Borland's efforts to get
Delphi as part of a learning curriculum. It's a great language for
learning programming, and a great language for productive development
after you've learned. Delphi is still one of my all-time favorite
languages.

Ok, now for a small dose of reality: students and fresh hires out of
college do not dictate what languages or products the company they work
for chooses for development. Those days are gone, back in the late 80s
and early 90s.

So, while the IT industry was built by individuals who had vision and
passion for their favorite tools and had the power (because there was
no one to gainsay them) to choose their favorite development tool for
business use, the IT industry is now run by the corporation, not the
individual. And the corporation will go with what is perceived as the
"safe" bet, not the best bet.

The BEST thing Borland can do to make any and all of its products
successful is to achieve a reputation as a solid, high quality and
reliability company that produces excellent software development
products for the entire application lifecyle.

Fortunately, (while the too-intimate experiences here might indicate
otherwise) Borland does still have a broad industry reputation as a
company that produces high-quality and innovative products. I hope that
reputation only grows stronger in the future.

For Borland to increase its perceived reliability, we must have better
communication with our customers. We need to tell them what we're
working on, what bugs they can expect to be fixed in the near future,
and give them at least an 18-month roadmap. Until such time as Borland
starts telling customers and potential customers the information they
need to know to make business decisions based on Borland's product
plans. In an information vaccuum, no one can hear the customer leave.

Developer Relations (my organization, which includes David Intersimone,
Christine Ellis, Anders Ohlsson, Andrea Ginsberg, Karen Giles and
myself) all lobby non-stop and loudly (internally) for a public roadmap
to provide our customers. As with everything else worthwhile we have
achieved at Borland, it will take a long time and a lot of campaigning.
We don't give up until the answer is "Yes." Sometimes it has taken 5
years or more to get the "Yes" answer. Although the public doesn't see
it, we get closer to a "Yes" answer on the public roadmap all the time.

In summary, Borland's success is tied much more closely to how the
company and products are perceived in the business world, rather than
the educational world. While it is important to have "grass roots"
support as well as corporate mindshare, corporate mindshare is where
Borland needs to get better. We've always been good at getting the
"grass roots" support. These days, it's easy enough to get grass roots
support: as long as your product is tolerably good, just make it free.
But that doesn't keep you in business for very long.

This is a mushy issue, and please don't be an extremist when reading
this post. There are many factors and perceptions I'm not touching on
in this message, but I don't have the time to write the novel-length
message that would be required.

Just consider this the reduced-fat, low-carb, infomercial version of a
much longer post that could be summarized to this Cliff notes version.
;) 

-- 
John Kaster, Borland Developer Relations, http://bdn.borland.com
BorCon2004, all info in one place! http://info.borland.com/conf2004
Features and bugs: http://qc.borland.com 
Get source: http://cc.borland.com
Unofficial information overload: http://blogs.borland.com

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