Re: Understanding Borland

James K Smith wrote:

Making a suggestion of this nature tastes like too much conspiracy to me,
but I'd love to get a straight answer on if there are any official or
unofficial agreements or threats in place that would discourage the use of
the Devco assets for anything outside of the Windows roadmap.

I can understand a touch of conspiracy paranoia wherever
deals with Redmond are mentioned but I think that the
reality is probably a bit more mundane, IMO. Borland are
exclusively targeting the enterprise market and are geared
towards doing so through piggybacking of the two leading
technologies in that space, .NET and Java. Therefore, while
they still had an IDE business it probably made sense in the
context of their bigger picture to try and shoehorn Delphi
into that .NET space...

However, IMHO, I think that when the new CEO came in, he
quickly assessed that there was no future in selling a
commercial Java IDE in the post-Eclipse world and that the
only folk who would be making /any/ money in the .NET IDE
space would be the based in Redmond...hence we get the
divestiture of the developer tools division while the Borland
ALM suite goes where the money is...Eclipse and Visual Studio.

Now, the /potentially/ good thing about DevCo is that they
/should/ no longer be part of a broader corporate vision that
forced them to release a me-too Pascal compiler for .NET that
95% of even the Delphi faithful (who are pretty much the only
folk left in the developer world who give a rat's a$$ for Pascal
at all) don't use and won't use any time south of hell freezing
over. The fact they are still profitable /at all/ is down to the
money they continue to make from selling folk what MS /does not
give them/ (i.e. a RAD native development IDE and compiler).
Surely there is a big clue in there as to where the new company
must go. Forging out in new directions will doubtless be a long,
difficult road (which might not even pay off for them) but that
"MS hind teat" approach is simply a road going nowhere other than
oblivion - and that is cast-iron guaranteed.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Bigger isnt always better
    ... The VB IDE was nothing near the VC++ IDE. ... I said "The VCL literally introduces IDE dependence". ... Win32 and for those developers Delphi is quite likely the best developer ... Many of the noticeable innovations came out of places like AT&T ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: Understanding Borland
    ... only folk who would be making /any/ money in the .NET IDE ... corporate vision is nothing more than the fact that chasing the Windows ... market is deeply ingrained in the Borland marketing psyche. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: Windows XPe - Sorry, Getting Feed UP
    ... > IDE Mode, hooked directly to the IDE Cable, you would have to power down ... This is why many of embedded developers don't consider XPe as a trully embedded OS but rather a componentized version of XP Pro. ... That is why I never trust advertisements that one don't have to be a developer to do "this and that". ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.embedded)
  • Re: suggestion to increase sale of Delphi 2006
    ... almost goes against the whole concept of what the Borland RAD IDE ... You make it sound like everything a developer needs is ... I wouldn't expect a 1-man shop ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: Borland plans separate company for Delphi, JBuilder, C++Builder, InterBase, JDataStore and other
    ... individual developer productivity using the people inside Borland who are ... It is not a trivial decision to separate our IDE business from our ALM ... investment in our ALM and developer products. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)