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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.
So anybody want to start a collection to open source them?
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?
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.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
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
maybe you could refactor it as a duplicate /. story detector.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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#.....
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.
ALM products give middle-managers wet dreams, mostly. Other than that, nobody really knows what the hell they're for.
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!"
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