I thought I'd take a moment to dispell any myth regarding whether or not we take the current (or past) Delphi survey seriously and they really don't end up in some black hole. In between Mods E and F here at the Scotts Valley, CA campus, there's an entire wall that is one huge dry erase board (whiteboard). Just yesterday, the latest preliminary survey results were printed and taped up on that board for all to see (internal to Borland that is). It is quite interesting to read over all the results. Now one item of note is that while we do take these surveys very seriously, they are just a part of the overall picture. We also take into account a lot of information from our field sales teams, the Product Line Sales Managers for the various regions, and customer site visits, etc... The following photos (taken with the now infamous phone cam...;-) are just the results from the Delphi 2005 users only, so there's a lot more data to mine. This was also only after the first day the survey was posted. No, I'm not going to provide higher resolution photos because we generally don't publish the results of these surveys. Mainly because of what I said above; they are only a part of the overall picture (no pun intended ;-). As we mix in data from all the other sources, things could vary substantially from the raw survey results. Besides, raw or cooked, internal marketing data is a critical business datapoint and should be held very close... why hand free marketing research to your competitors?
If you look closely at the picture on the left, you can see the written text “1st Day results...” Also, nevermind the tic-tac-toe game to the left ;-)...
The problem with the survey, is it effectively blocked a C++Builder user from participating, since the first question was "what version of Delphi...".
ReplyDeleteBorland has a long way to go, if it hopes to attract C++ developers again. We stuck it out using C++Builder 6 and all its problems, for several years.
Does Borland care about its C++ developers? Seems like they are only interested in supporting Delpi and Java.
Good stuff! It is good to know that my feedback is not useless.
ReplyDeleteWhoever play that tic tac toe, they should know that the center square is the most strategic square. :)
To Tom: a little of hope here - it is comming! I think it was announced already that C++ line will be addressed in next release of Delphi.
ReplyDeleteAs of today we have Delphi, Delphi# and C#... next is to add C++ as it is in VS2005
All I can see is the survey needed more about Kylix. Kylix is the hidden gem of Linux Development, if it was updated to use the latest distributions(i.e. latest gnome and KDE) I love Kylix and use it all the time for Apache development and TCP/IP daemons using Synapse. I have a tcp/ip daemon created with Kylix that does popup notifications for a secure file transfer site and it's been running since dec 2003 with only a couple of reboots for kernel updates, and the exact same code runs perfect on D7 and 2005.
ReplyDeleteWell as a C++ programmer I also jumped into the survey with gusto, that is until, there was no option for me in the first question.
ReplyDeleteBut then I thought that evaluating Delphi 2005 should count. So I went ahead and answered the rest on this justification.
I think that C++ Builder users have now become more used belonging in the "future Delphi" that Borland themselfs imagine - so its seems, anyway.
I think if Borland can support C# on a decent level, it will be OK for all of us - Delphi or C++ developers. It's kind a common factor.
ReplyDelete