Borland/Codegear Doesn't Plan to Revive Kylix

An anonymous reader writes "Borland's tools spinoff, CodeGear, is laying plans to revive the classic developer products — but Kylix is staying dead, the CEO says. "I hear lots of discussions about Kylix, but I didn't see lots of revenue in my reports about Kylix," he told CRN."

Comments

To be more precise yet...

[Svartalf]

The Linux crowd has a natural dislike for products that don't work well and cost money. We've little issues with paying money for things that work right. Kylix was a feeble attempt on Borland's part, done far, far too late to make any difference in things.

Stupid bad timing.

[GallaherMike]

At the time of the release it was not like there was much potential of a big revenue stream from the nix crowd to begin with. Who was the target audience? Lone developers that would have used it to build "free" apps. couldn't afford it, and corporate dev. shops that were using nix were only using it on the back end. So at best you are building middle tier or web services, both of which were already well supported by other languages/platforms for nix.

There were functional problems as well. Making Delphi/CBuilder developers not use the controls and code base for win32 but requiring the use of CLX and custom libs for Kylix portability. An unstable initial IDE release. To name a few. Developers that work in Delphi or CBuilder all the time think in those languages, and know all the details (hidden features/bugs) of the controls they use. The compiler/linker should have taken care of the different platforms. Like compiler options that determine if you are compiling against win32 or nix. Making the developers try and remember all the differences is the same as making them learn a new language. Thats just dumb, and if there is one thing developers tend not to be it's dumb.

Now if you come forward to today where Desktop nix is starting to make headway. What would be really interesting is if there were a stable version of Kylix that let you use your Delphi or CBuilder code, (not CLX and custom libraries for nix.) and the compiler/linker took care of the platform specifics. Price it around the same as the Turbos. You have a good viable product. ["Of course if wishes were horses we would all be eating steak"]

I don't think Borland/CodeGear has the courage to do this. Because while the website says "Where developers matter" what it really means is "Where developers pocketbooks matter". Just look at the sad state of the BDS products. Borland hopped on the .NET train because that was where the money "is/was" but now instead of innovating, they play catch up for the privilege of being dependent on someone else's technology.

I could rail all day on mistakes Borland made, but as they say hindsight is 20/20. Let's not focus on the past but look forward to the future and all the mistakes they have yet to make.

Re:Not a surprise

[Kiaser Zohsay]

I'm surprised nobody has bothered to use wxWidgets to clone Delphi.

Check out Lazarus. Not exactly a "clone", but very close and much more cross platform.