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Borland Divests IDEs to Focus on ALM 159

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the change-of-pace dept.
ShinyBrowncoat writes "Borland recently announced they are putting their IDE business up for sale (JBuilder, Delphi, etc.)." This move comes at the same time Borland announced they would be aggressively pushing forward with their Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) business by purchasing Segue Software Inc.
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Borland Divests IDEs to Focus on ALM More

Borland Divests IDEs to Focus on ALM

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  • Oh Great!... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by yagu ( 721525 ) * <yayaguNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @02:42PM (#14671949) Journal

    Borland, long the maker of some kickass development tools now is interested in aggressively pursuing a company whose opening paragraph on it's web site home page begins:

    Segue Software is a global leader dedicated to delivering quality optimization solutions that ensure the accuracy and performance of enterprise applications. ...

    Sigh. I guess not they're pursuing the kickass world of business-speak (including but not limited to the term: Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)).

    For the record, I'm not opposed to quality tools, but, first and foremost, application lifecycle management (ooops, sorry, ALM) is less a result of some tool "delivering quality optimization solutions that ensure..." and more a result of teams of people; clients, designers, coders, etc., that know how and what to do.

    So long Borland, it's been nice knowing you.

    Interesting shift in focus.

    • Sigh. I guess not they're pursuing the kickass world of business-speak (including but not limited to the term: Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)).

      It's not only that, but the thing that always gets me is when you up to these company's websites to find out exactly what they do, it's just pages and pages of business speak. How are you supposed to get customers if they can't even figure out if they even need you?

      A friend of mine has a small company that does a lot of software for banking transactions. Wh

      • Re:Oh Great!... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Directrix1 ( 157787 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @03:15PM (#14672253)
        Let me go ahead and plug a couple projects for the disillusioned masses reading this:
        Free Delphi Alternative:
        Lazarus [freepascal.org]
        Free C++ IDEs:
        Anjuta [sourceforge.net], Code::Blocks [codeblocks.org], KDevelop (works with other langs too I believe) [kdevelop.org]
        Free Python IDE:
        Stani's Python Editor [stani.be]
        Free Visual Basic Alternative:
        Gambas [sourceforge.net]
        Free Java (and others) IDE:
        Eclipse [eclipse.org]

        • Re:Oh Great!... (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          There's a bunch of free languages and IDEs indeed. Even microsoft has a bunch of totally free "express edition" offerings which are surprisingly good (you can compile using the SDK too - don't need an IDE for that).

        • Re:Oh Great!... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by HanClinto ( 621615 )
          Nothing that I've found yet seems to be a good stepping-stone to migrate away from oodles of code written in C++ Kylix. Lazarus is great if you wrote your Kylix apps in Pascal, but for people tied to C++, it's not a happy situation. We finally opted for a split solution in the form of KDevelop+QTDesigner for some stuff, and to C#+GTK# for some other stuff, but I'd love to hear what other peoples migration experiences have been. None of these free IDEs offer quite what Kylix did in terms of ease-of-use, RAD
          • wxWidgets and Code::Blocks I hear is a good choice. You can also use wxGlade to generate your IDEs. I'm not so much a C man myself, so I have very little first hand experience with the C side of wxWidgets.
        • Let's not leave jEdit [jedit.org] off of that list. It was the only thing I found cool enough to make me move on from my umpty-skiddle year relationship with Emacs. (Yeah, I've tried Eclipse, and not to get into an IDE war, but it just seemed too heavyweight for me.)

          • Eclipse took me a long while to get used to, but now I prefer it to emacs. Refactoring support is what put it over for me.

            Jedit is good for the occasional "I just want to edit a file" task.

            I use emacs for lots of data massaging tasks that I probably should use Perl for.

        • Re:Oh Great!... (Score:3, Informative)

          by MBGMorden ( 803437 )
          None of those come close to replacing C++ Builder, which is the easiet IDE I've found yet to quickly generate useable applications. It's basically like Visual BASIC but with C++ instead of BASIC for the backend code. The GUI can be draw and you can then directly assign code/actions as the results of various widget activities.

          Now granted, I've used other environments. I've cranked out a few applications (both Windows and Linux) using Glade and gcc/g++. It works, and when I do Unix development it's a God-


          • My sentiments exactly. I haven't done as much *nix GUI development as it sounds like you have, but for my Win32 apps, I found BCB to be oodles above any VS environment. I wish they had a light-weight, personal edition of the new BCB, but alas, only standard, professional and enterprise.

            BCB was even my segue into Delphi. There was a list control that did almost everything I wanted. So, I took the source (that came for free), modified it to my needs, and presto, a new control that did everything I w

        • Re:Oh Great!... (Score:3, Informative)

          by icepick72 ( 834363 )
          Also free VB.NET and C# compilers by downloading the Microsoft .NET Runtime SDK. (Only Visual Studio IDE costs $)
          Combine Microsoft's free C# compiler and tools with the Open Source Sharp Develop IDE [icsharpcode.net] and you have a free C# development environment. Nice.
      • You're forgetting that the customers will not be normal people but marketing and business types who do comprehend that gibberish. Let's face it how many non-techies would understand a programmer talking about multiple inheritance, objects, widgets etc?

    • Borland: It's a sad end. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @03:22PM (#14672320) Homepage
      It's a sad end. Borland once made the best assembler for DOS, for example. Sometimes the Microsoft assembler would produce the wrong machine code, so it was useless, at least to me.

      Borland was the best in what it did in several ways.

      But after Philippe Kahn [wikipedia.org] destroyed Borland's chances by buying dBase and Ashton-Tate [wikipedia.org] for $440,000,000, the company lost its way. I estimate that dBase was worth perhaps $40,000,000 then.

      Mr. Kahn threw away $400,000,000!! That's the kind of thing that happens when a technical company has top managers who know nothing about technical issues, and don't care that they don't know, and don't have respect for people who do.

      Managers who cannot understand the business of their companies often turn to evil; they destroy lives and they destroy their companies. There are many, many examples of this.

      After the fall and the departure of Mr. Kahn, Borland became a small shell of itself, a shell that sold excellent software development tools and IDEs.

      Now Borland is Borland in name only, like AT & T is now just a name that has been bought to disguise the ownership of a despised company, SBC. (It is not just my opinion that SBC is despised; many people say that.)
      • I parted company with Borland, and Windows too when I got bit by their crappy C++ compiler. Switched to gcc on Linux and never looked back.

        Some bugs I remember: Turbo C 2.0 couldn't compile one of the combo assignment/bit operators. A simple statement like "a = 1;" or "a ^= 1;" (don't recall exactly) and the compiler would quit and give an assembly dump. Later, with Borland C++ 3.0, "a = 1;" worked, but I could never get programs that used more than 64K to work right because the compiler couldn't han

        • Later, with Borland C++ 3.0, "a = 1;" worked, but I could never get programs that used more than 64K to work right because the compiler couldn't handle segments correctly. I didn't realize what was really going on, just noticed programs doing weird stuff, fiddle with something that wasn't related to the real problem and then see the program mysteriously work right.

          Having written dozens of professional applications with Borland C in my time, I have to say that this is simply not true. Borland C (BC 3.1

          • Just recently, I tried some fairly straightforward code (http://pdcurses.sf.net/ [sf.net] in Borland 3.1. I wondered why it came with an option set to disable register variables, and tried turning that off. Weird errors resulted -- specifically, trails after the bouncing balls in "newdemo". But it still worked OK in Turbo C 3.0, as well as Borland 4.0. (Not to mention all the other supported compilers.) I could never figure out the problem; to me, it looks very much like a compiler bug.

            • You are right!! I guess I must eat my hat now :-)

              Since I like to fiddle with compilers and I have many santimental memories of BC 3.1, I downloaded pdcurses, fixed the DOS makefile (which was broken, by the way!) and reproduced exactly the problem you are describing. After half an hour of digging, I found out that the bug is not caused by register variables, but by induction variable optimization. It is illustrated by this sample code:

              void bad_induction ( long * buf )
              {
              int y, yd;

              y = 10;
              yd = 1;

              while

          • (That should've been a>>=1; in gp)

            Borland C++ was very robust and in your experience bad programmers habitually blame the compiler? Maybe so. I have been convinced at least once that I found a bug in gcc only to find out it was my code. Nevertheless Borland C++ up to 4.5 was not a good compiler. Not suspecting the compiler is maddening when the problem IS the compiler. You will spend days chasing your tail and not finding anything wrong with your code. So much for productivity. Did your doze

            • I did not mean to offend you and I apologize if I did. I also said nothing about bad programers :-) Especially since it turns out that I was wrong and I was proven wrong - see the other post and my reply to it ... In my defense, your blanket statement about mysterious failures and changing memory locations did not leave the impression that you had investigated the problems thoroughly.

              It is not really fair to compare a 16-bit compiler for a segmented architecture to a 32-bit one for a flat memory model, e

      • That's the kind of thing that happens when a technical company has top managers who know nothing about technical issues

        IIRC (it's been 21 years since I first bought TP 2.0 for CP/M), Kahn helped write the original TP. He definitely knows compilers.

        He just can't value companies. Throwing away $400,000,000 really is a sin...
        • It's been 23 years. I think Mr. Kahn bought Turbo Pascal [wikipedia.org] from Anders Hejlsberg.

          I've never seen any evidence that Mr. Kahn understood technical things. No one who understood much about programming would have thought Ed Esber's Ashton-Tate was worth $440,000,000. Apparently Kahn got lucky when he hired Anders Hejlsberg, who does know what he's doing.

          When Hejlsberg gave in to his dark side, Borland was left without a technical head, and has been confused ever since.
          • Note this biography [fullpower.com] of Philippe Kahn. I imagine that it is biography-speak, and Mr. Kahn does not have technical knowledge.
          • Mr. Kahn was probably the mastermind behind the cheesy Byte Magazine ads trumpeting the $49.95 Turbo Pascal. I was actually put off by the ads -- the price seemed too low for anything good (I believe MS Fortran sold for about $400 in those days), the name Turbo anything seemed complete hype, and the ad graphics had all of the style of your local appliance king in the pre Best Buy days.

            But a colleague at work said, "No, it actually is a good product", I dropped what I was using at the time: would you beli

    • Re:Oh Great!... (Score:3, Informative)

      by NavySpy ( 39494 )
      I think you are missing the point here totally. Borland is /selling/ Delphi and the rest of the tools, to a new company, preferably a company for whom these products would be /the/ focus. Presumably as well, this means that you'll stop seeing the DoubleSpeak that you get from Borland.

      This is /good/ news for people that want the "Old" Borland back.
      • It will be good news IF the new owner is indeed like the old Borland. Do we know that yet?

        BTW, what's going to happen to Borland's "museum", where you could get free copies of their older compilers?

    • Re:Oh Great!... (Score:2, Informative)

      by aevans ( 933829 )
      ALM means an automated windows testing tool, in this case, Silk Test. (Think spy+ plus a recorder and scripting language) It's competitors are Mercury Interactive (Winrunner, Loadrunner, Quick Test Pro) and IBM (Rational Robot.) There are various other tools that are often bundled with this (bundled meaning sold together) that are basically bad bug tracking tools, worse build tools, version control, and some programs that allow you to write requirements and tests in outlines or spreadsheets using really c
    • With their new focus on enterprise computing, they should change their name to something like Inprise.
    • My thoughts exactly. Borland has decided to shift from actually making something useful, to "managing" stuff other people made. What happens when NO ONE makes anything, and everyone focuses on "management"??

      It's much like how whenever I go to a company's website, and the very first thing I see is their "investment" info, or a series of corporate buzzwords like those you cite, I know that company works solely to keep their *stockholders* happy... but products? customers?? Who needs 'em, they're just needless

  • Cool (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hackwrench ( 573697 ) <hackwrench@hotmail.com> on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @02:43PM (#14671958) Homepage Journal
    So anybody want to start a collection to open source them?

    • Re:Cool (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Since the story was submitted by ShinyBrowncoat, maybe we could buy Firefly too?

      Borland Firefly. It has a ring to it.

      Take my love, take my land
      Take me where I cannot stand
      I don't care, I'm still free
      You can't take my I D E ...

    • I think I would pay money to see Kylix open-sourced.
    • IBM bought Rational Software for their LIFECYCLE tools, and makes money selling them as Eclipse/WSAD integrations.

      Far as I can tell, they are copying this model: Ditching the OLD IDEs, and standardizing on the goodies (much of it better than Rational's) that they got through their acquisition of Together-J.

      So it will be Borland's lifecycle moneymakers competing against IBM's lifecycle moneymakers, all on the Eclipse platform. I think Borland management smells weakness in what IBM has done to the Rational pr

  • This is curious... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @02:46PM (#14671982)
    What's left of Borland after they sell off their IDEs? And, on a related note, why did Metroworks get rid of Codewarrior for the Mac/PC? Aren't the IDEs the crown jewels for these companies? Or are they being crushed by Microsoft Visual Studio on one side and OSS IDEs on the other?
    • The only people who really use CodeWarrior anymore are console game programmers and embedded system developers. You can charge a lot more per copy in those markets, and I'm sure the customers are a lot more likely to buy support contracts. The Mac and especially PC versions of CodeWarrior were probably costing them more than it was worth to maintain them.

    • Re:This is curious... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Teese ( 89081 )
      Metrowerks sold their x86 compiler technology (to Nokia) about 6 months before Apple announced the switch.

      Metrowerks is also owned by Freescale (Motorola), the makers of PowerPC chips.

      Codewarrior was competing against a free development environment (XCode) in their primary market.

      It's no wonder they stopped making it for Macs.
      • plus, if you remember Jobs' keynote from June when they announced the intel switch, he kept stressing "use Xcode, use Xcode, use Xcode..." for everything. the put up some fancy graphs that made it appear to be easy to make universals in xcode but a very difficult in codewarrior. i guess the guys at metroworks got the hint!!! as i'm not really a cocoa developer, i'm not too terribly concerned. except that windows development has been almost exclusively VS, and i fear the same problems will afflict the ma
    • Metrowerks was bought by Freescale (aka Motorola) and sold off its x86 technology [metrowerks.com], presumably to focus on embedded applications of moto's 68K/PPC. The other half of their business is game development systems [metrowerks.com], where 2 of those systems are PPC (although IBM-sourced, not Moto) and the other two (PS2 & PSP) are RISC.

      I still don't know why they dropped out of the OSX market - maybe competing against Apple's "free" tools was too tough. They currently aren't competing with MS, either.

    • What's left of Borland after they sell off their IDEs? And, on a related note, why did Metroworks get rid of Codewarrior for the Mac/PC? Aren't the IDEs the crown jewels for these companies? Or are they being crushed by Microsoft Visual Studio on one side and OSS IDEs on the other?

      To the best of my knowledge, Novell is the only major OS vendor that never supplied its own IDE/Compiler to its developer channel [which, to this day, I believe to be the primary reason their channel vanished to basically nothi

  • Still in Business? (Score:5, Funny)

    by drewzhrodague ( 606182 ) <drew@zhroda g u e .net> on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @02:48PM (#14671999) Homepage Journal
    Wow, Borland is still in business? I remember that I never got Turbo C to compile the examples that were in the book that came with it. I blame them for me not being such a great programmer.

  • Wow. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by vasqzr ( 619165 )

    It wouldn't be so heartbreaking if Borland wasn't the company that basically brought the IDE to the PC with TurboPascal.

    Edit, compile, run, debug, all from one program.

    • TurboPascal

      Ah those were the days. 15 years old and I've got a CP/M system. It was a great IDE but I didn't pay for it of course.

      In about 1997 when I left my last job the developers around me working on windows (I was an OpenVMS guy by then) wouldn't touch anything without a Microsoft brand on it. For them Microsoft was kind of a god, pretty much the same relationship which exists between the department secretary and Word.

      Windows development had become in some way non-technical. Borland catered to techni

    • Re:Wow. (Score:2)

      by fm6 ( 162816 )
      As I recall, you couldn't edit any source module that couldn't fit in a 64K segment! I guess that's one way to eliminate code bloat...
    • Turbo Pascal was the first programming language I ever learned.
      I still have some of the code I wrote with Turbo Pascal and later Delphi (plus some stuff I wrote in *cough*VB*cough*). I still use Delphi (version 7, not that .NET framework crap) for a couple of things. (although I am now a C/C++ programmer for the most part)

      It is sad to see what has happened to the once great company that practically invented the modern PC IDE and development environment. If the borland-corel merger had gone ahead, I think we
  • As a longtime Borland user (from Turbo pascal 1.0) I'm not surprised by this.
    Juilder is a good product but way too expensive.

    Delphi was the greatest tool on the planet (IMHO) but they didn't do enough to Pascal to enable it to compete with Java and .NET.

    As for C++ Builder. Much better than MFC but too little too late.

    But the REALLY big problem was that they had nothing to compete with the communities that built up around other tools and languages. No MSDN. No Jakarta. No CPAN etc etc.

    • But the REALLY big problem was that they had nothing to compete with the communities that built up around other tools and languages. No MSDN. No Jakarta. No CPAN etc etc.

      Actually, the problem was that they did nothing to foster a community in the first place. I recognized Borland as a dying company five years ago, when I started doing production work with Delphi. I'd try to look something up online, only to find that my answers were in a different alphabet.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @03:45PM (#14672524)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Argh, so much for my JBuilder duplicate code detection plugin [blogs.com]. Such is life...
  • Now that ActiveState has been spun out [activestate.com] of Sophos, might it be an opportunity to merge all those IDEs into one super bundle ?
  • RIP BGI, BC++ 3.1, and Turbovision.

    All great things for their day. Well, BGI (Borland Graphics Interface) never quite had the speed to do much, but everything they did was innovate. At least until the point where they stopped innovating, which was basically after Borland C++ 3.1. I have yet to see a comparable IDE. Turbovision was pretty cool, it was essentially the DOS equivalent to curses, and what they used to make their IDE.

    I think M$ killed Borland with Windows95. It wasn't clear if they new how to mak
  • They ignored the Open Source movement (Linux included) and hobby programmers. After Microsoft had beat them with Visual Basic, they could only keep their loyal market. What's after that? Death.

    They should have followed Netscape's example and opensource their IDEs.

    But no - instead, they decided to overinflate their prices, and well, the rest is history (pun intended).
    • And where's netscape now?
      • And where's netscape now?

        They were already broke when Microsoft beat them with the monopolic practices. However, thanks to them we have Firefox, and the Mozilla Foundation has taken their place.

        Maybe you're right, perhaps open sourcing the IDE wouldn't have been the right solution, but to provide it for free for noncommercial use. Oh well.
    • They should have followed Netscape's example and opensource their IDEs.


      And we see how much good that did for Netscape.

      I learned C on a Turbo C++ 3 for DOS. I'll miss it, but maybe we've entered an era where it's Microsoft vs. Open Source, with no room left for anyone in between. If that's the case, it's kind of sad, and somewhat ironic, considering the spread of open source was supposed to enhance consumer freedom, not curtail it.

    • They ignored the Open Source movement (Linux included) and hobby programmers.

      They may have mishandled these, but they didn't totally ignore these markets. They sold low-cost versions of their language products for hobbyists, they had Kylix for Linux -- which they never really tried hard enough to promote (and gave up on too quickly). Maybe they should've cut the prices in half on the "Personal" line. Sure, they never open-sourced the Kylix IDE (and developers were always asking for it), but you got the

  • Technology companies are always looking at their bland-but-profitable product lines and saying, "Hey, these aren't sexy! No wonder the investors hate us!" So they move into some new market that the consultants tell them is real hot — usually with disasterous results. The old business is either sold off or de-emphasized, to avoid "tarnishing" the company's image.

    Borland did this once before, when they acquired a bunch of middleware and database companies and announced that they were no longer the too

  • one can but hope that Delphi survives... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Malor ( 3658 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @06:15PM (#14673664) Journal
    I absolutely loved the early versions of Delphi. The manuals that came with it were long, involved, and brilliant. It was like being taken on a tour of what programming should really be like by about ten of the smartest guys in the business. Writing Object Pascal felt, much of the time, like writing poetry. The component library was clean and beautifully laid out. The IDE was super-responsive. And it could compile code faster than anything on the planet at the time. Back in the days of the 486, compile time really mattered, and being able to do 10,000 lines per minute on a 486-33 was extremely impressive. (hopefully I'm remembering my numbers correctly, it HAS been a very long time... it might have even been 100,000, but that seems too fast for a 486. Whatever the actual number was, it was, god, twenty times faster than anything else.) And a compiled Delphi program was just one EXE. No DLLs, no runtime, no dependencies, no distribution headaches... one EXE you could dump on a floppy and hand to someone. And the code was lightning-quick.

    But then it started going in a strange direction... after Delphi 3, they decided to focus totally on database programming, and they ignored most of the other good stuff. And somewhere in that time frame, Microsoft swooped in and bought Anders Hejlsberg, the real brain behind Delphi. They correctly identified him as THE guy at Borland, and paid him a cool million in hard cash, upfront, to come to work for them. We are seeing the final results of losing Anders now. Without him at the technical helm, Borland entered into a long, slow decline. Delphi went off the rails, they forgot what was really great about it... it turned into a bloated mass of crud, focused on a tiny subset of the full universe of programming.

    And then there was Kylix, which was an abortion if I ever saw one... what a horrible piece of software. I coughed up $1200 for the first Pro version because I was excited to see Delphi on Linux.... except it really wasn't. It looked like Delphi, but it didn't feel like it. It was still fundamentally a Windows program, with the minimum amount of effort needed to port things. Distributing a Kylix app was freaking impossible if you didn't already understand the Linux library system very intimately. There was nothing at all like the 'single-exe' feature, even though they made claims about 'easy distribution' on the box. And the documentation was terrible, just incredibly bad.

    Seeing Borland die at this point would be more of a relief than anything; they have become a clueless company and haven't got a prayer of long-term survival. They have pissed all over everything they've ever done. You'd have to be an idiot to choose their software these days, between the freeware and the commercial alternatives.

    For Microsoft, hiring Anders was a brilliant move; destroy a competitor for just one million dollars, pocket change from their standpoint. Anders worked on language recognition for awhile, but eventually he went back into compiler technology. He's the main brain behind this little language you might have heard of, C#.....
    • Crap, I hit submit too soon. The last thing I wanted to say was... hopefully whoever picks up Delphi and Kylix will have a clue and know what to do with them. I'd like to see something *like* Kylix, but married intimately into XWindows and KDE or GNOME, and able to product standalone executables. Or, at the very least, they should have utilities to create tarballs with all the necessary files.

      But after having been burned that bad on Kylix, it'll take some seriously strong recommendations, and probably a
    • I started using Delphi at version 5.0 when I worked for a company that developed all client software in Delphi. This was my first major taste at windows application development, and I can tell you, that I *loved* Delphi, even at version 5 and 6. If you claim that it went downhill after 3.0, well it still _rocked_ compared to everything else.

      It's really a shame that MS has such dominance over IDE's on windows. I think Visual Studio sucks rocks, it really does. After using Delphi it just seems so inferior it'
    • Anders left for one simple reason - he was tired of working on Delphi/Object Pascal. He saw Java, wanted to go and work on a "Delphi for Java" (which became JBuilder) but Borland refused and said; "No.. you're the Delphi Guy". He replied; "No.. I'm the former Borland employee" and quit.

      Then he called Microsoft. And of course, MS was more than happy to snap him up. Since MS couldn't succeed in screwing over Java into their own image - they reinvented it as C# - nothing more than a pale immitation. Sorry

      • Re:Take a little insider info on this... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anthony Boyd ( 242971 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @07:28AM (#14676239) Homepage

        I worked at Borland during the time in question, and what you describe is not what I saw first hand. But maybe you know Anders personally, and have better info. It just clashes with what I saw.

        For example, Anders did not quit and call Microsoft. Microsoft recruited him while he was still employed at Borland. In fact, they sent a limo to pick him up right at the Borland entrance. And how badly did he want to leave Borland? So not badly that when Microsoft offered him a cool million, he asked Borland to match (not beat) the offer, so he could stay.

        It was only when Borland execs rejected the idea of any developer being worth a million that he bailed.

        Also, while I can't say what Anders thought of Delphi, I can say that the "Delphi for Java" text you put in quotes sounds an awful lot like how he described what he was going to do at his new job, not what he asked of Borland.

        As an aside, one bit of data that was clear almost immediately was that everyone -- except for 2 or 3 execs -- thought that losing Anders was awful. It wasn't one of those decisions where, looking back months or years later, you realized it was wrong. It was instantaneous. The decision was made, and every VP and Director I knew said, "Terrible move! Over a lousy million!"

      • Since MS couldn't succeed in screwing over Java into their own image - they reinvented it as C# - nothing more than a pale immitation. Sorry .NET guys - your guiding light in Anders failed.

        Bahah, are Java guys the most bitter developers in the world? Sun is busy copying features from C# for Java 5 left and right, and Joe Bitter here calls C# a pale imitation. Hilarious.

        First off, take a look at what's coming for C# 3.0 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1253 [lambda-the-ultimate.org]. Next, realize Java's failures on the client

  • A personal testimony on Borland history (Score:3, Interesting)

    by carribeiro ( 952204 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @06:32PM (#14673776)

    I don't know in the US, or in other countries, but here in Brazil Borland is still relatively popular. For a long time, Borland had the lead on development tools. But since it started to fall apart, it never recovered, and it's just a shadow of what it once was. Many people blame Philippe Khan, others blame the subsequent CEOs and the whole Inprise imbroglio. But I prefer to look at it from a programmers perspective.

    I started Turbo Pascal 2.0, on floppies. I remember seeing the ads on Byte Magazine. For anyone who tried Pascal on CP/M, or in USCD's implementation, it was a dream come true. And it was really fast! Later, I worked with all versions - from 3.0 to 5.5, and then Borland Pascal 6.0, with object orientation and Turbo Vision, a character based event-driven framework. I have the impression that Borland at that time tried too much, too hard; they tried to change paradigms, to change the way we programmed, but it was too big a change at once. But history does not stop here. Borland managed to get a lot of things wrong in a couple of years. Quattro was ok, but lacked the 'extra something' that made Borland special. Paradox was innovative for its time, but its stability was never something to write home about (IMHO, it managed to be worse in this respect than Access, and I'm giving my personal testimony on this). Borland even tried to run the clock backwards and sell a text processor named Sprint that I'm sure only the true dinossaurs around here will remember hearing about.

    However, Borland still had some gas, and a new chance to get things right. A few years later, I got my hands on the Delphi 1 beta - it was a eighteen 1.44 floppy install, in a time when CDs were still far from popular. The quality of Delphi was amazing - they just got it right. But by then, VB had a small edge. For some reason, and for lots of small misteps, Borland gradually started to lose the lead.

    I still can't get what happened around the whole Inprise situation. That they opensourced Interbase, just to close the source later, is something that I don't understand. They also got the pricing wrong. Borland always had the lead on low cost tools, but it started to charge one arm and one leg for a usable toolkit. The 'personal' editions were crippled, and missed some features that almost everyone needed (such as compiling ActiveX controls, or using the database controls in the library). It started to lose touch with the developers. The community (a vibrant one) started to look for other tools, just at the time when open source was starting to become mainstream.

    By the way, even in the pre-Internet days, the community was amazing. One of the first popular software repositories in the Internet was Professor Timo Salmi's ftp.uwasa.fi. There were huge repositories of Pascal componentes, many of them in eastern Europe - Poland and Russia, for example. Borland could have amassed the power of the community, but for some reason, it largely ignored them. Students, once one of the strongholds of Borland penetration, were also ignored.

    It's a shame that a company like Borland had to go this way. I personally would prefer that the ALM division was divested with a new name, so that Borland, the company, could be allowed to die with dignity. Perhaps a new structure - a Borland Foundation perhaps (borland.org anyone) - could pick the bones to start again. But I fear that's too late, even for that.

    • Oi, Brasileiro,

      You said, "I still can't get what happened around the whole Inprise situation."

      That was frightening to see. But that's what happens when a technically oriented company has managers who don't understand technical things. They say they can manage, but they can't.
    • Sprint!

      Oh, I remember Sprint. I used it for a loooong time, seeing it as a kind of LaTeX on steroids. Great program, and my father used it for many many years to write severel books with it.
      Even today I can recommend it (yes, honestly ;)

      It's interesting to see Borland finally fall apart. I always expected it to die much earlier: not only did the info from there turn into marketdroid-talking trash, the prices also rose sky-high.

      Oh, well. I used Delphi (and TurboPascal) since '86, and our company is still run
  • All the descriptions I have read puzzle me. Why exactly would I use one of these ALM products? What do they do?

  • What will happen to Borlands patent portfolio? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @08:57PM (#14674500)
    Specifically, US patent 5,628,016 on structured exception handling. This patent is preventing the Wine, ReactOS, GCC and MingW people from supporting exception handling that is compatible with the Microsoft implementation.

  • I'm pretty skeptical of this new area of business for Borland, but we'll see how it goes.

    But I suspect the IDE business was a loser proposition anyway. Pascal is headed towards its death throws (not yet, but it's headed there). Java is still growing, but IBM killed the market by releasing Eclipse for free. C++ is stagnant at best, and in decline at worst. Besides which, Microsoft has used its predatory practices to grab too much of that market. Postgres and MySQL have killed Borland's database ambitions and
    • ...those lifecycle tools were made options for Websphere development and became a big money-maker for IBM's "IDE Business".

      And with IBM now giving away their base IDE, it seems Borland wants to go in the same direction.
  • http://groups.google.com/group/borland.public.delp hi.non-tec [google.com]
    hnical/browse_frm/thread/9781ff657b80368a?q=group% 3Aborland.
    public.delphi.*+author%3Adavidi%40borland.com&hl=e n&

    or

    http://tinyurl.com/8hcek [tinyurl.com]

    Scroll down to post 4, it should have been the first but something happened with google's cache.

    Summary:
    They're looking to refocus the IDE tools group into a company that can focus on the tools and the developers. Also they're still working on the tools, same people nothing has changed, and it'll be so
    • Sounds like David I will be with the new company. That mitigates my depression about this somewhat. Perhaps the new company can be called "Borland" and the ALM company can be called something else (how about "Inprise"?). I do this for a living, and I don't even know what "ALM" is. Borland has chased some wild geese over the years and the only constant has been the developer tools. Maybe it is better for the developer tools to have their own company.
  • I've been using Delphi since version 1.0, and I just upgraded from D6 to D2006 (first upgrade I've taken in several years). I've a lot of code and expertese wrapped up in the product.

    My initial thought was that language transfers never work (the ghost of Ashton-Tate haunts us yet :-). But it is just possible that Delphi could be turned around. Despite being in decline for many years now it does still have a loyal following and a vast established user and resource base with interest in everything OpenGL t
  • If they sell their IDE tools to someone who can market them properly, maybe more people will begin to use them. Perhaps we'll even see a "Delphi Express Edition."
  • I wonder what the price tag of these picees of software will be. Probabably beyond what's feasible to raise.

    One can only imagine the impact that an open source Delphi or C++ Builder would have. It'd be a nice gesture given the loyal developers who stuck with Borland. I still haven't found a C++ RAD tool as efficient as Builder.

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