Turbo: A great idea, not properly thought through... ?


Seems the Turbo line misses the point in two key areas:

- Regaining the support of pre-BDS Delphi users

- Not adequately addressing the needs of the stated target audience by
actively preventing the use of the Turbo range to fully "Explore" the
potential of the BDS suite


On a superficial bean counting level I can appreciate the thinking
behind not offering an upgrade path to Turbo from pre-BDS Delphi, but I
believe that thinking was wrong. I think there are a lot of people who
would like to be able to upgrade to Turbo from D7 (and earlier) who will
instead simply sit tight and wait and see what happens with Turbo/BDS 07


On a technical level I can understand how the architecture of BDS
prevents multiple Turbos from being installable on a single machine - it
comes with the territory when you hack a multiple personality product to
support only a single personality and then release the multi-personality
framework in multiple, single personality editions.

However, I don't see this as washing with the target audience, as
stated.


It seems to me that Turbo was announced prematurely.


If new, potential BDS users were the target time should have been taken
to properly architect a Turbo IDE into which multiple personalities
could be installed as required.

i.e. Download Turbo Explorer IDE + Delphi language then optionally
download and install C# language support, all within the single Explorer
IDE.

If this isn't how the Explorers are intended to be used, and a "Studio"
environment restricted to fully paid up BDS users, then the time should
have been taken to create truly stand-alone Explorer IDE's for each
language.



The rush to announce and release the Turbo range might be explained if
the intention were to attract disillusioned pre-BDS developers who don't
need and don't want the multi-lingual capabilities of BDS back into the
Delphi fold.

This would make sense since such users already KNOW that they only want
a single language IDE and therefore aren't going to be bothered by the
limitation of only being able to install a single language IDE. They
also relady know what they need to do to get multiple languages.

But as is becoming increasingly clear, this is clearly not the aim of
the Turbo's.


The aim and intent is to get new users, something for which the product
is particularly poorly architected to achieve.

Yet the ideal target audience is specifically and deliberately denied a
reasonable upgrade path.


Which begs the question: Wherefore art thou "Turbo"?


--
Jolyon Smith
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Still unclear about future of Turbo
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  • Re: Turbo: A great idea, not properly thought through... ?
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