"Today Borland announced plans to seek a buyer for our IDE product lines that include Delphi, C++Builder, C#Builder, JBuilder (and Peloton), InterBase, JDataStore, nDataStore, Kylix, and our older Borland and Turbo language products and tools. The goal is to create a standalone business focused on advancing individual developer productivity using the people inside Borland who are focused on the success of these award winning products."
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Member since:
2006-01-02
Member since:2005-07-12
>> What's left?
That was my thoughts... took me a few minutes after reading the article to even figure out that "ALM" stood for Application Middleware - consisting of things like visibroker, interbase and a bunch of other stuff that I can't imagine actually being enough to keep them in business.
This reminds me of GM closing down Oldsmobile; their only profitable product line...
Member since:
2005-07-20
Member since:
2005-07-12
Man, what memories that brings up. I used Delphi from version 1 through 4, skipped over 5 and bought 6. I didn't like the weight your executables put on between 4 and 6, and I didn't like the double-registration requirement either.
I think the death-knell of Delphi for me was Linux. I tried Kylix, but was less than satisfied. Playing around with Qt and wxWidgets also showed me that developing GUI apps could be quite easy under Linux, without resorting to a hack like Kylix.
Good luck Borland, but I think the momentum behind your development tools started to fade soon after Windows 95 was launched. All that's left now is for some other company to buy up the remnants of the Borland developer tools division.
Member since:
2006-01-18
Tools going down the drain was the fault of Borland itself. It was more along the lines of switching to Inprise than back to Borland.
During the heydeys of Philip Kahn Borland hat the motto, fair tools for a fair price. And the price was really fair with Enterprise (back then professional) editions being 100-200 dollars.
Then came Inprise and the we buy a product and then we raise the prise to the sky and then we do not know what to do with it strategy. This still worked due to the fact of being in the middle of a Dot Bomb bubble.
Then the bubble faded, Borland basically pushed sometimes to major updates within a year to raise money on the tools (I am talking about JBuilder here)
and also .Net came, and in Java Eclipse took over.
Well now we have a situation of a Borland still wanting major bucks for features you can get already for a fair price or free again. So we have a fair tools for a fair price situation again, but not with Borland.
(Yes I know JBuilder for instance still has entry and professional versions but compared to similar offerings from Eclipse and Netbeans they are a joke)
On the windows side Borland got severe pressure from Microsoft with their .Net offerings, no market there.
Linux could work, but that strategy was shot down after their initial offering did not raise any money (no long term strategy like Microsoft but instant cash has to be made)
and the db market basically was abandoned in the mid nineties by not pushing the back then exceptionally good Inprise more but having constantly the sword of killing it off on top of it. So that the devs were forced to fork the codebase away to have the product even survive and be further developed in a sane manner.
Actually most of the problems Borland nowadays has are self caused, and they do not have anything to do with the quality of the product but more with the management having been on a curvy course since the days when Philip Kahn was kicked out of the company. It is a wonder that this stuff has not happened way longer before and that Borland still is alive. Only an IBM has made more mistakes in the past and survived.
Member since:
2005-07-28
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2006-02-08
Member since:
2005-06-29
I was just watching the video on channel 9 "behind the code" about Anders (a former long-time Borland developer who is the mastermind behind Delphi and TurboPascal, and now the man behind C#). He said one of the reasons he left Borland was that he had a disagreement with management about where the company should go:
He thought it should make dev tools like Delphi.
They thought it should go in some direction which he couldn't understand.
So, it seems, for a long time, Borland has wanted to not be the Delphi company anymore but be something "Enterprise" or some such fad word.
Member since:
2005-12-03
I, for one, will be happy if there is a new company that can focus on these products. It's been suggested to do this by its users for a very long time because it was all too apparent that Borland no longer had the resources or drive to maintain these products. If only from a corporate standpoint where market gains and profits are concerned. A smaller outfit would be quite satisfied with the profit margin I would think. I sure would start buying their products again. I'm still waiting for the next version of C++ Builder.
Member since:
2005-07-20
>Time to start making money by adding value to Eclipse.
I don't think Eclipse will ever be as simple to use as Delphi, for GUI desktop applications I still think there is nothing to beat Delphi (including VS.NET). The productivty gains from using Delphi are significant. I've tried to Eclipse a number of times and it just not the same, the GUI builder is not as good and staring a project is somewhat non-trivial.
I agree with some previous contribitors that Borland priced themselves out of their market. As I said before, D2006 looks good, it's very responsive and stable, much better than D2005, more like a real Borland product, plus it combines Object Pascal, C#, C and C++ into one IDE, but shame about the price.
Member since:2005-07-28
Member since:2006-01-16
Well there's Free Pascal Compiler (capable of compiling 99% of delphi sources: http://www.freepascal.org ) and also Lazarus (which is Cross-Platform (and better at it than kylix was) at: http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org )
While FPC is considered stable and mature Lazarus has still some road ahead but most missing parts are those done by 3rd party programmers like additional components of which many could be easily converted from Delphi if their auther just put a bit work behind.
Lazarus creates native applications on Windows, Linux, OSX(these are only gtk but carbon is underway) and FreeBSD to my knowlidge.
Member since:2005-07-08
Member since:
2005-07-20
I don't think Lazarus counts. I think the big difference between open source and commerical software is polish. The reason why I based my busines on Delphi was because it worked out of the box and it work very well. That's why we pay money for tools because we know we're getting that extra bit that makes the difference.
Member since:2006-01-16
Lazarus cannot compare with delphi on windows perhaps but it surpassed Kylix on Linux (and other platforms) long ago. It all depends on your needs. There are things which you can do with Lazarus "out of the box" just like with Delphi, there are things which you can't. And saying opensource software is lacking polish is a bit imature. It's more like "always in development".
Member since:
2006-01-18
After Philip Kahn was kicked out the price hiking took over unfortunately and kicked them out of the core market. (Probably due the Inprise, Business etc... everywhere buzzwords, typical MBA stuff of people who did not understand what Borlands Core business really was)
I can remember, a time when it was around 97 or 98, we were evaluating Corba middleware servers back then, and we settled for one, one day before we placed the order it became official that Inprise bought the company and within that day the price was raised 100% for the server.
There was no discussion anymore that we did not go with Inprise back then but went for Iona which was significantly cheaper after the Inprise price hike.
Back then in those inprise days also the dev tools started to become unaffordable for people who did not have an upgrade option 1-2 years later I personally stopped using the Borland products for personal use due to the pricing.
(I was probably not alone in this, nowadays you cannot find any people who use this stuff as their entries into programming like it used to be)
Member since:
2005-07-07
Borland is in serious need of cash.
As for others. Well, Borland was making one mistake after another. Trying to sqeeze too fast money with dead projects like Kylix. A serious example of company without a clear vision.
But it would be nice if some company like Novell or IBM would buy off those products and opensource them. Compilers are in fact not important really here, developer tools are.
1. Delphi.NET and C#Builder could become major player again if adapted to Mono.
2. IDE tools could become very fancy with GCC backend
3. Firebird already exists, so I don't see the point in Interbase
4. Kylix was dead in the water anyway
I just wonder how much money Borland expects to get for those. I can bet that they could sell Delphi IDE to public as quick as Blender did if they would sell the same way, even if number would be counted in millions. Even I would be prepared to chip in at least $1000, and I suspect many companies would be also
Member since:
2005-07-20
Member since:2005-08-22
Member since:
2006-01-01
Mr. Kvarod the pundit:
I predict that Novell will buy Borland's development products and use them to bring Delphi's lauded RAD to Linux, creating a synergy between Mono and Borland's development on the .NET platform. Infused with the productivity improvements of Borland's tools GNOME will rocket past the long overdue Vista.
My apologies to any hypothetical pundits named Mr. Kvarod.
