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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'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.)
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
ALM products give middle-managers wet dreams, mostly. Other than that, nobody really knows what the hell they're for.