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Microsoft to Buy Rational and/or Borland?
oblivious writes "I got this in e-mail this evening: According to a Reuters report that crossed the wires late today, the speculation is that Microsoft will make bids to buy both Rational and Borland. Shares of both Rational and Borland are up on the news, and so far both IBM and Microsoft have no comment on this report." We recently ran a story about IBMs planned purchase of Rational. Chris didn't make clear in here - it's not that Microsoft might buy both, but that Borland might be a likely target, if a bid to buy Rational out from under IBM fails, which it is likely too. Rational and IBM have signed the substantive portion of the agreement already, so any sort of counter bid would have some fun legal consequences for all involved.
I seriously doubt that MS is not going to continue Borland's line of compilers.
Borland offers a free (as in $0) C++ compiler for download. Anyone who is interested in getting it should download it now, since if MS buys Borland, I doubt it will be available much longer.
Of course, this is not a total tragedy, since thanks to GNU, the gcc team, and DJ Delorie, there will always be DJGPP, which is free in a broader sense.
They've already signed an agreement for IBM to buy Rational.
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http://www.rational.com/news/press/pr_view.jsp?
If there were any rumor about MS thinking about bidding for both Rational and Borland as part of the same universe (and bear in mind that even the separate rumors are just rumors), it would surely have been in the first paragraph of Reuters' story, instead of what is (Rational), which is the more important rumor of the two.
Obviously, im not the only one to point this out but.. If MS where to buy Borland, that would make life of the Kylix in Linux quite unstable. While kylix is allready in its second phase and we havent seen massive amounts of free and/or proprietary software build with it, its still microsoft acting against certain market..
Also, Borland products are competing with Visual Studio series, and allthou i havent used anything from Rational (nor from VisualStudio), i guess MS has data modelling tools just like Rational... Yey! Good for competition..
yush
To our valued customers:
.NET, and others.
We are delighted to tell you that IBM and Rational Software have announced a definitive agreement for IBM to purchase Rational. This is a very exciting time for both companies and builds on the extensive business relationship IBM and Rational have had for over 20 years. Most importantly, it will provide significant benefits to you.
If you've been using Rational's solution to build business applications to automate your business, you will appreciate the combination of Rational's solution with IBM's e-business strategy. IBM helps customers integrate their business processes and software infrastructures to build an on-demand e-business. This requires the integration of software development, transaction management, data management, collaboration, and systems management and security. With Rational's demonstrated strength in software development, IBM will offer leading solutions in each of these categories and provide a complete solution for creating an on-demand e-business. This includes broad support for your application development efforts for a variety of environments, including J2EE,
If you've been using Rational's solution to build software for software products and systems, you'll enjoy the benefits of an improved solution through the combination of IBM and Rational technology. Rational's outstanding solution in this space will be amplified through synergies with IBM's pervasive computing strategy. This is an important market for IBM, and Rational is key to IBM's software strategy. Whether you're building a software product, a technical system, real-time software, or embedded software, IBM will be able to provide you with industry-leading products, services and support.
Rational will become the fifth division in IBM Software Group (joining WebSphere, DB2, Lotus, and Tivoli) and retain its brand identity. The division will be led by Mike Devlin, Rational's current CEO.
As with other business acquisitions of this nature, this one will require government regulatory approval and the approval of Rational's shareholders.
IBM and Rational are impressive as separate entities. Together, with our complementary software strategies, people talents, and commitment to customer success, we can provide you with even more value.
Thank you for your continued support. We look forward to expanding our relationship with you in the future.
Best regards,
Steve Mills
Senior Vice President & Group Executive
IBM Software Group
Michael Devlin
CEO
Rational Software
Well, M$ already has Anders Hejlsberg - the
chief architect/inventor of both Delphi and
C#. I guess it was only a matter of time...
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
Actually, this story is more accurate.
First this is jusr rumors and speculations.
Second, Borland will likely become an acquisition target for MS ONLY in the event that IBM complete the acquisition of Rational.
If MS do acquire Borland, that will be funny (and painful at the same time). They would acquire a bunch of very popular Java products! And the UML tool (which is the thing they are the most interested in) is written in Java! What will they do with it... convert it to C#?
successful? How?
Um, because they'll get shares of MSFT which are backed by $40 billion in cash reserves?
But you're right, that's the end.
Borland's products will be examined for what they can contribute to MS Visual Whatever and then be slowly phased out after they've been assimilated.
Taking the argument further, and in reverse, I think it's been a damn shame that good compiler technology has been kept on a leash in Redmond to further awkward corporate interests rather than simply providing quality, standards-based development tools. Yes, MS does provide development tools that are good to some extent already, but they could be so even more if they were untied from the corporation.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Microsoft in buying Borland aquires not only a UML modelling tool (Borland recently aquired TogetherSoft). But, they also purchase one of the better Java vendors out there. This move is both offensive and defensive. M$ gains a UML modelling environment while simultaneously killing off a significant segment of the Java tools industry.
If Microsoft pursues Rational as well they end up with the 2 best UML tools in the industry and kill off IBM's strategic partner. The net effect is that Microsoft wins big.
However, I can't believe that M$' shareholders would agree that both purchases are necessary. I expect that if Microsoft is unable to sway Rational over then we will see them make a serious bid for Borland. After all its the UML modelling software that MS wants, and if the IBM purchase of Rational goes through then MS has no modeller for their developers.
Seeing as IBM is a large player in open source software (Apache/Eclipse/Linux) and Java I personally hope to see the Rational purchase succeed, however, M$ has a crap load of cash sitting on hand - if M$ wants to start a bidding war they certainly have the ability to.
And so the consolidation in the industry continues.
Plus, Borland just bought StarBase, which produces the StarTeam SCM system, as seen in this press release. (Wow, just look at the way the Borland logo is plastered all over the StarBase website!)
So with Rational and Borland, they knock out 2 competitors in the SCM market!
JBuilder has a cousin. Oracle's JDeveloper! Oracle licensed JBuilder code from Borland and started a separate branch in the late 1990s. It is a very good IDE. And yes, its free for "personal" use and it works on Linux.
"There's no right, there's no wrong. There's only popular opinion." --Jeffrey Goines
Hell, maybe MS's plan is to buy them and keep them funded and alive to prove to the courts they are interested in competition. Its just as likely.
No, it's not. Showing interest in competition means staying away
and letting the products compete in the marketplace. The courts know this.
Given the choice of interpreting this as:
a) MS killing off some weaker competitors
b) MS liking competition so much that they'll buy competitors and
lose money to keep them afloat.
I have a very hard time seeing anyone, viewing both options as "just as likely",
especially not a court in an anti-trust case.
That's like saying Notepad competes with Word.
ClearCase is a full, team oriented SCM. Very robust.
Source Safe is fine for small development project (teams of 1-5, projects that have very few releases etc) but it doesn't scale well, has sh*tty back up capabilities (Can't backup if someone's logged in, can't force someone to logout...) and most of the cool functionality of a SCM (Labeling, branching, merging) are very poorly implimented.
Not to say that I don't use it for my personal development projects (scripts, small C++ COM objects, VB projects), but you must understand it's limitations.
www.christopherlewis.com
Oracle JDevloper 9i no longer has any remnants of the license agreement with Borland that was reached in the '90s. All Borland components were written out of JDeveloper with the release of 9i.
Are you on drug(s)?!! Why not?
Compare lazarus to delphi or kylix.
bad: Some points are still missing.
good: They are evolving fast enough
bad: not fast enough, at least if you wanna move now
good: It's native in all OS
good: It works much better than wined-kylix (debuging in kylix is a real pain in the ass, it remembers me on windows days, crash, (optional restart), crash, must restart or logoff (or kill all processes in top - delphi and windows are not included, restart is a must there))
bad: less features than kylix
good: lighter, faster
all in all together. I have licensed delphi 7 and kylix 3, but I don't use them, only for some small db projects. All my other work is more console than gui, so lazarus ROCKS, at least for me.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
ummmmmm....Microsoft is still selling foxpro. A new version just came out last year. There is still dev going on for FP as well.
What is left after that??!! True, Delphi kicks VB's ass in every possible catigory...but after you take out C++Builder and Kylix you are left with
1. Delphi -- Competes with VB
2. JBuilder -- ya, MS just loves Java!
3. Interbase -- already got SQL Server, Access and Fox Pro
4. People -- oh wait, they already hired all of them away.
Consider this, Borland is MS biggest competitor in the compiler market. MS would buy Borland and gut it. Once again, the superior technology (Borland) looses.
Bad User. No biscuit!
> I stopped using Borland products after Delphi 3 (the newer ones didn't offer that much more...)
You stopped at the wrong version. Many useful features were added in 4 and properly debugged in 5. If you use Professional, version 5 is your best bet. There are lots of IDE improvements (in particular navigation and code completion), plus forms are stored as text. I don't think 6 and 7 added much value to Professional, mainly lots of Enterprise and Web stuff.
There are still people using JBuilder? Seriously you need to take a look at the new version of IntelliJ IDEA - I have yet to show it to anyone who hasn't become a dedicated convert within a couple of days. No it's not free, but at $400 for better than Jbuilder Enterprise functionality it's a damn bargain!
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
What?
Niether of these Bullets came from Borland.
MFC worked better than OWL because M$ was leveraging thier OS APIs with it and not sharing the information with Borland. There was little Borland could do to compete. If your assertion had ANY merit (that backwords compatibility was more important than being able to give away your product) then Borland Delphi would have destroyed DESTROYED Visual Basic a long time ago.
Bullet #2:
Microsoft sold Access (which still sucks) for $99 or gave it away with office. Borland couldn't compete with Micosofts ability to throw money at the problem with dBase or Paradox.
While Borland has certainly shot themselves in the foot many a time, niether of your "bullets" is valid and both are fine examples of MS flexing it's monopoly muscle.
Only to the extent that a bank competes with random strangers as a reasonable place to keep my money. SourceSafe may be viewed by many as a reasonable alternative for Clearcase, but that's a horrible mistake. SourceSafe is deeply flawed and inappropriate for any but the most trivial situations. I've written a paper on Visual SourceSafe's many flaws. Spread the word! Friends don't let friends use SourceSafe!
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Um... CLX is based on QT. Partially at least.
http://www.drbob42.com/kylix/kylix.htm
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;
Borland makes Delphi; Delphi refers to both the IDE and the language formerly known as Object Pascal.
Delphi-the-language is probably the most elegant of all general-purpose object-oriented programming languages available today. Sadly, Delphi is a relatively unknown product, and many who do use it don't use it to its full potential.
Delphi-the-IDE could use some polishing, but it's already feature-rich and very pleasurable to use.
Soldiers fighting overseas would pay local prostitutes by giving them their boots.
And while we're on the topics of JDeveloper and Rational, it's worth noting that JDev now integrates class and activity UML diagramming tools. Also, the 9i developer suite includes an Oracle repository-based SCM tool. So, apparently, Oracle has decided to go their own way on the UML and SCM fronts (although, oddly enough, I recall that a couple of years ago some Oracle people I was working with were discussing rumours of Oracle buying Rational).
I'll second the opinion that it's a good IDE. It's straight Java...I run it on Win2K, Linux, and Solaris. Get it here if you're curious.
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