Re: Another Anders H. interview

From: Dan Barclay (Dan_at_MVPs.org)
Date: 03/16/05 

Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 13:05:33 -0600

"Danny Thorpe" <dthorpe@bozofilter.borland.com> wrote in message
news:xn0dzth5t014f008@newsgroups.borland.com...
> Chris Brooksbank wrote:
>
>> Yup seems to be Borlands biggest boast ( and a great thing ) - but
>> its only important to existing customers with existing Delphi code.
>>
>
> Compatibility extends both forward and backward. If you are
> considering building your business on a technology, would you choose a
> technology from a company with a long history of cast-off solutions, or
> a technology from a company with a long history of migration paths and
> bridges from one implementation to the next?

I've got an answer!!

> Straddling Win32 and .NET is where Borland eat's Microsoft's lunch.

Yup.

> It's very clear that Microsoft's corporate mentality focuses on "new"
> without much regard to migration.

Yup. "The Next Big Thing" is *all* that matters.

> This is largely a result of
> Microsoft's huge size - there are so many groups within Microsoft that
> have no idea what the others are doing, so it's very easy for
> incompatible solutions to emerge from separate development paths.

Actually, it's not because of their size, per se. It's because of what they
do with personnel assignments. Sadly, I don't know of anyone on the VB team
that really has a strong background with VB... particularly with *using* it.
I think their key "language guy" *started* with the VB team on the VB7
(VB.Net) project. Some of the key managers on the VB team come from VFP.

> Microsoft's policy of employee shuffling (employees are encouraged to
> transfer to different projects about every 18 months) is intended to
> prevent too much tech knowledge from getting lodged into any one
> individual (a liability to the company), but it also has the side
> effect of preventing most of the folks who work on a product from
> knowing anything about the product's history.

Yes, this policy (as opposed to sheer numbers of people) is the root of the
problem. Of course, it also matters (repeating myself here) that they don't
*have* many people inside MS with Basic experience.

> The small size of the Delphi team is an asset in the opposite sense:
> fewer people with longer tenure carry with them a sense of "lore" about
> the product, what has been tried before, what kinds of things lead to
> problems, nasty bugs, etc.

And (more redundancy on my part<g>) the Delphi team actually uses Delphi!

> The challenge for Borland is to not allow
> this lore to inhibit forward thinking and innovation.

Yes. Fortunately, there is no need for the lore (I call it Language
Stability) to inhibit progress or innovation. Stability is *not* the
equivalent of stagnation. As an example, MS could have brought all the
features currently offered by VB.Net into a VBClassic.Net. They just chose
not to, and actually (genuinely) thought they were making positive changes
when they "fixed" the language.

> -Danny

Dan <let's do this On Ramp thing>

> --
> Delphi Compiler Core: http://blogs.borland.com/dcc

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