Well, my access card worked. I guess I still have a job :-).
I just finished listening to a company (Embarcadero not Borland) wide conference call announcing to the whole company the closure of the Embarcadero+CodeGear deal. Wayne Williams, our new boss, made some very encouraging statements. Most notably was that just like ER/Studio, RapidSQL, and DBArtisan, Delphi/C++Builder are core Embarcadero product offerings. This means that these products are key to the business. Yes, there are many other products being sold, incubated and introduced, but it is the aforementioned products that form the pillars on which the company is based. Without them, many of the other products would not be possible. Like the foundation of a home, you just don't take a metaphoric jackhammer to them and expect the structure (the company) to remain sound.
Another encouraging (or maybe scary, depending upon your perspective) point was that we are the last independent tools vendor with the breadth of offerings we have out there. This means no vendor or stack lock-in. We have tools for nearly every database and OS platform out there. We are also one the of the very few software companies that offer very strong non-Open Source tools right along side tools built either on or for Open Source stacks. JBuilder and 3rdRail are built on top of the very popular Eclipse framework. Delphi for PHP and 3rdRail are built for the very popular and widely used Open Source PHP and Ruby/Rails environments, respectively.
How things will change or even stay the same is still being planned and scoped. A lot of work had been done between the announcement of this deal and its close, but now is where most of the work can actually take place. Now that we're no longer joined to Borland, we can now chart a new course under a new captain. I wish all the best for Borland as I've seen many happy and exciting days while there.
An interesting anomaly is that many of the CodeGear folks have had their service bridged, which means that some of us have, on paper, now worked for Embarcadero longer then they've existed :-). This is now day 6022 for me.
I see Embarcadero as a very good opportunity for CodeGear. I expect the new company to become a leader in his market. I whish the most success to all employees.
ReplyDeleteThe last paragraph is familiar because when Cisco merged Scientific Atlanta, many SA employees had the same cases.
ReplyDeleteNice post Allen, thanks a lot.
ReplyDeleteAbout "Another encouraging (or maybe scary, depending upon your perspective) point was that we are the last independent tools vendor with the breadth of offerings we have out there. This means no vendor or stack lock-in."
...do you asked yourself WHY you are the last one? :-)
From top of my head: Well, there is Microsoft. But aside of this, a much more interesting phenomenon is FOSS. See, there's a plethora of (F)OSS offerings in our area (references available upon request - but I think you're aware of them). OTOH, only you remained as a 'closed-source' vendor. No, I really don't think that you must open-source Delphi (or whatever developer tool you have,) but in order to survive you must adopt the advantages of OSS development model and avoid its pitfalls. Imho, mainly its about leveraging the community as a force in product shaping. Well, as a vendor you have the unique opportunity to have a 'controlled democracy'. In fact the huge success of Delphi in the past came from the close synergy between developers with excellent communication skills (Danny Thorpe comes in mind) and community. This synergy gave you all: stellar product, loyal user base, very skilled programmers (eg. TeamB) which helped you in many tasks (support, site design, QC implementation etc.). Why don't you do it again?