Here's just a few quick links to what some of my colleagues are saying about today's announcement:
Adam Markowitz - Sojourn of Delphi
David Lock - Delphi grows up, moves out
David Intersimone - Borland plans separate company...
John Kaster - Exciting times for Borland's developer tools
Anders Ohlsson - It's a fabulous day
While I appreciate the optimism of Borland employees, this move just cannot be good for the IDE tools group, its employees, or its customers.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, if this group was financially strong, and Borland wanted to "invest in ALM," then it would do an IPO. But, instead, the plan is apparently to find a buyer that is willing to make further investments in the business with the hope of securing future payback.
I think today's announcement is just another in a long series of strategy mistakes by Borland upper management which has cost Borland so much market share over the years. It is really a sad situation.
It is sad... as a developer, all i see is that "Real" Borland is on sale. (The ALM Borland is inprise re-born)
ReplyDeleteBut it is nice to see so optimistic borlanders...
What will happen to those with software assurance? Will the new company honour it?
ReplyDeleteIf MS takes over the development tools, it will be the end of WIN32 and future WIN64 compilers.
It will be .NET or .NET
JP, Borland has a legal obligation with Software Assurance contracts, which it will have to honor unless it ceases to exist. When the IDE group separates, part of that will probably be to decide how to handle those contracts.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that Borland IDEs are going to go away today or tomorrow. Therefore, you will still have choices, although Microsoft tools are continuing to gain popularity as other companies continue to make mistakes and drive away customers.
You shouldn't frame native executables vs. .NET as a Borland-vs-Microsoft thing - that isn't the case at all. Both companies have support for both native executables and .NET and will for some time into the future. So the choice of level of abstraction and vendor are still relatively independent.
It is true, however, that Microsoft is leading in .NET, whereas others are following. But the reason to follow is that it is a compelling technology and a good improvement over native executables.
I think it's a Microsoft's conspiracy that borland has so many decisional mistakes... beggining with changing the name of Pascal to Delphi, if they'd changed the name of Pascal to Visual Pascal, all the world ought to be programming in VP instead of VB... Second BIG mistake, changing Borland to Inprise... Third Mistake, deprecating some products like Kylix, Fourth Mistake, not giving so publicity to Interbase and not giving Interbase personell all the tools to improve, fifth mistake, firing IB staff... sixth mistake, no expansion to other platforms... and the most of all, SELLING IDEs!!!!
ReplyDeleteThe future of the IDE is a killing issue, mainly from our client point of view.
ReplyDeleteThere is big pressure for us to switch to C#: future of Delphi, Net 2.x etc.
I do not want to but we may have to. What is DevCo/Borland doing ?