Wednesday, February 8, 2006

What about the "Borland" Name? My opinion.

A very common question and comment that keeps recurring is “Why doesn't the new IDE company keep the Borland name and the surviving company rename around the ALM strategy?”  In principle, I agree that this would be an ideal thing to happen.  I, too, have an extreme attachment to “Borland.”  However, if we have to lose the Borland name in order to gain autonomy, focus, invesment and all the things we know is needed to keep Delphi on a forward track, I'll count it as a huge net gain.  Yes, let us mourn the loss of the Borland name attached to Delphi, but at the same time let us celebrate the opportunities and opened doors that are now ahead of us!

In the end, the Delphi and JBuilder names carry significant brand recognition all on their own.  They seemed to survive the “Inprise” debacle quite well.  I'm confident that whatever the “NewCo” name ends up being, it will be complementary and recognizable.  This assumes, of course, that the spin out winds up being an independent company (my personal preference).

BTW, you'll notice that I'll never use the term “divestiture” or “divest.”  Those are ugly and cold.  I prefer “spin-out” or “spin-off.”  They sound, at least to me, to be much more positive.

3 comments:

  1. Hey,


    Maybe Steve Jobs will buy ya'll with all that IPod profit.


    He would like nothing better than if Apple had a better Windows Development environment than MS! BTW, Apples are going Intel...Hmmm..Delphi/C#/C++ for the Apple OS.


    Wow, now that sounds seriously scary!


    Best wishes!

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  2. The Borland name should go with the IDE group. That is its heritage and what we customers associate with the name.


    The balance of the company should come up with some new age name like Inprise. Customers who are looking for "Software Delivery Optimization" and "Integrated Application Lifecycle Management," or "Mastering Critical Processes of Software Delivery" don't associate that with the brand Borland.


    Frankly, I don't even know what all that stuff means. I just want to buy a compiler and debugger. Sheesh!

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  3. Really, really, really wishing the awesome people at Borland the best of all.


    I agree with other posters here, let them have "Inprise", it's the corporate wet dreams of enterprise dominance that brought the company to this situation, not the awesome products.


    Will you be able to work together with the Mono and Freepascal/Lazarus guys now ?


    Will we see a true revival of Kylix and not some lukewarm intent to lure the open source side ?


    And the all time favourite dream compiler of all, the Delphi/VCL for Java bytecode ?

    Would you be able to play with Sun, IBM, Oracle and Apple on that ?


    Or is still a Microsoft nay worth more than thousands of customers ?


    Caution, great excitement, inconditional support,

    best of all,


    vruz


    ReplyDelete

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