Re: A little conspiracy theory (extended and revised)

"Captain Jake" wrote

[...]
you looking like you were in control, or it can be a nasty mass
mutiny/defection. You choose."

While obviously purely speculative, I don't find your "Sell us or we walk"
scenario that far fetched. The NewDevCo folks are openly elated about the
split, which can only be read as a not-too-implicit indictment of senior
management.

But what other reasons might there be for management agreeing?

First, the argument of 'focus' is pure drivel. Anyone believe that Delphi
was starving for lack of CEO attention? What, are we to think D Thorpe, A
Bauer, M Swindell.C Jazdzewski et al incapable of making daily decisions
without adult supervision? The issue was never management focus, but
resource starvation, and that wouldn't take divestiture to fix. Anyone
swallowing the idea that only having a dollar to go around can be solved by
dividing it into two 50 cent shares (less 20 cents for the cost of division)
is an idiot, but that's what the focus argument boils down to.

Second, in technical terms the split makes about as much sense as sand in
your lubicant. Look at all the cross licensing that has to be done and
integration work potentially wasted. On the Delphi side, Delphi would be
much the less for losing integral Together, StarTeam, and CaliberRM
bindings, and, on the ALM side, Borland is losing a feature that clearly
distinguishes it from Mercury Interactive and the other players in the ALM
game: a complete stack of tools that reaches from developer to CIO to
enterprise IT consumer. And the required cross licensing makes the IDE tools
arguably less attractive to any competitor; who wants to buy a tool shop
that doesn't own its own technology?

Then there's the bit about different target markets and sales models. Even
if Delphi and JBuilder didn't provide a lot of added wow factor at the board
room level, they still should have been poster children for the sales pitch:
"We sell ALM/SDO--and we use them ourselves to build the finest IDEs on the
planet, at a profit, in one of software's toughest markets. We can teach you
to do it, too." It's a great story.

So what do we have instead? The company selling SDO finds it wants to drop
its core tool divisions because they're not aligned with corporate
direction? How's that for a snappy sales pitch? "Make your software
development efforts a rational, managed operation: sell them."

Then there's the question of who's buying. suffice it to say I haven't heard
a convincing candidate. Won't be MS--The BDS doesn't have anything MS needs,
and is more valuable as an external prod to the VS team anyway. IBM? They've
already demonstrated their level of interest in the IDE business by throwing
money at Eclipse while setting it free. IBM clearly understands that it
needs an IDE but stinks at writing them, so they'd rather just foot the bill
and let the Eclipse foundation call its own shots. And as several have
pointed out, the IDE market is not exactly an easy one that people are dying
to get into.

But perhaps we're all missing the obvious. The point of divesting the
IDE/tools business is not to sell them, but rather to prep Borland itself
for what Dale Fuller was originally brought on board to do--which was to
sell Borland. Without the dev tools, Borland's SDO/ALM stuff /is/ attractive
to MS--it's ahead of them in an area of strategic importance in MS's bid to
become an enterprise solution player, not just an OS vendor with a nice
little database. MS wants to challenge IBM, SAP, Oracle et al for boardroom
level attention, and buying Borland's ALM stack--less the stuff MS has no
use for (JBuilder, Interbase, Delphi)--would be a great step without the
image problems associated with buying Delphi just to let it die.

Personal guesses. Delphi may or may not survive--I'll hope for the best for
a bunch of people I respect a lot, and a product that's a joy to use, and
that has put food on my table for years. But Borland won't exist and an
independent company for more than a year after the sale. It doesn't even
intend to. That's the real agenda.

bobD


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