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Borland Divests IDEs to Focus on ALM
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.
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:
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.
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?
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.
JBuilder, like the other commercial Java IDEs, is being increasingly marginalized by capable free IDEs like Eclipse and NetBeants. Nobody uses VI to code java for a living for long.
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 destroyed Borland's chances by buying dBase and Ashton-Tate 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.)
As a longtime Borland user (from Turbo pascal 1.0) I'm not surprised by this.
.NET.
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
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.
I still have Delphi 7 on my box--it's a tremendous tool for developing Windows apps.
However, I am also very very glad I switched to development with open-source languages a few years ago, and I'm switching more and more to open-sourced development tools to go along with the open-source languages I utilize.
To hitch software development to any company is becoming increasingly precarious, not only because these companies can go out of business (or out of control like Microsoft), it's because proprietary tools makers have this strange propensity to overbuild their products to the point of buzzword-itis and uselessness (Delphi beyond version 7 is clearly that, and MS long ago strayed away from what developers need).
This stupid action by Borland, a once-great company, provides us in the open-source community yet another example to tell the story that open-source is not "free as in beer", but "free as in freedom".
And I will also take this opportunity to make a request to Borland regarding Delphi: Instead of selling it, OPEN SOURCE IT!!!!!
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
And where's netscape now?
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
Borland DIDN'T ignore Linux developers (see their Kylix product) - but there's no money to be made trying to sell something to people who got their OS and other tools for free. As for VB 'beating' Delphi - chuckle. Name the company who ditched backwards compatibility with VB6? Borland, and Delphi (BDS as it is now known) offer the ONLY migration path from Win32 to .NET.
People had been predicting Borland's 'death' for many, many years. Meanwhile, developers like myself smile, and keep on raking in the cash developing products based on their kick-arse tools, whilst VB 'programmers' scrabble around in a flooded job market.
ALM products give middle-managers wet dreams, mostly. Other than that, nobody really knows what the hell they're for.
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.
.NET guys - your guiding light in Anders failed.
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
Now Blake Stone - the "JBuilder Guy" and later CTO, OTOH, while I'm sure Microsoft thought they were getting a good deal in hiring him. They didn't. I'm still not sure what that guy actually did for JBuilder (or for Borland) that was worthwhile other than be an example of what happens when you DO NOT practice good dental hygene.
JBuilder is now basically dead - replaced by "Peloton" (i.e. JBuilder on the SWT-based abortion from IBM known as Eclipse). While I like some things about Eclipse (like it's pricetag) the SWT-based approach just makes Eclipse so much garbage on non Windows platforms (like Linux) and downright unusable on the Intel-based MacOS. Nice job, IBM - you've succeeded in muddying the waters even *MORE* for Java as a viable desktop platform.
But I digress....
I miss the Borland of the Turbo Pascal days too. But they're long gone. In fact that company has been gone since just before they bought Paradox.
Polymorphism -- It's what you make of it.