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

Jolyon Smith wrote:

It seems to me that Turbo was announced prematurely.

Well, sure, I've said it repeatedly, but only as a massive borland
class marketing blunder - not being able to properly capitalize on the
initial excitement, having to try and keep the excitement level up, try
to get all the various news outlets that gave them a mention to not
consider it old news or a byline when the download is actually
available etc.

But not as a design issue.

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.

Now here is the design issue. Oddly, it appears that BDS uses seperate
licenses for each language. Not sure why they don't just sell us per
language licensing instead of increasing the complexity of the product
by creating 4 new SKUs. Maybe they screwed up the license manager and
had no other choice. Certainly the license manager is not capable of
the resolution for the express versions, but just a single express
version incapable of components based off the pro version seems simpler
to manage than 8 seperate distros (4 languages, pro and express -
that's 8 seperate packages people!)

Some borland thinking still going on here. An express version with all
4 languages and a pro version that lets you add language licenses as
you go would certain seem easier. Hell, a single sku that has all 4
languages in express mode and you just upgrade the license on a
language by language basis would bring all 8 new skus down to a single
build.

Is this required? Nah, but it would make more sense. Does it make it
a mistake? Maybe a small one, but one that will likely get fixed in
future based just on economic pressures.

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.

Actually, even if they really screwed this up, it would probably take
me about 4-8 hours to fix the entire IDE to work this way. I doubt
they missed that fact themselves. They just want to make it hard to
give you an incentive to go for the full meal deal if you really want
it.

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.

Uh, or they need to prove to a buyer that they have some hope of
re-attracting the people that left them 50 million short in sales
perhaps?

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

I disagree completely. Free is going to work for Borland as well as it
does for MS. Ya, it sucks to not be able to run all 4 on the same
machine, or it would if virtual machines weren't so easy to use.

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

I dunno, 500$ upgrade if you just need 1 language and don't need the
fancy crap seems like a pretty reasonable upgrade path to me.

Someone mentioned that if you are on maintenance that it was less, but
that is ONLY if they release every 12 months. If they don't, it
automatically costs at least double.

Seems reasonable to pay the same price and avoid the risk too me.

Looks like there might even be a little more in the turbo pro than the
bds pro, at least if I read the BDS feature matrix and turbo feature
matrixes properly. I'll let you know for sure when I see the turbo pro
midas licensing issues just to use the clientdataset (if I understand
correctly, BDS pro still has licensing issues for clientdataset, which
seems foolish as equivalent license requirement doesn't exist for the
dotnet equivalent)

Once the Turbo is finally out and we actually see EXACTLY what we're
expected to plonk our cash down for, then we can truely compare apples
to apples for value.
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