Borland Dies.

By now every Delphi programmer knows about this.  But for all others, here you go:

Borland has release the first version of Delphi, since Delphi 5 in 1999ish, that has been truely worth the upgrade price.  Delphi 2006 (D9) pretty much guarantees the success of the company by being the ONLY compiler fill a niche (Win32 development) that MS’s move to dot .net created.  Only ONE of the new MS compilers will allow you to write a Win32 bit app (VC++ still allows it but VB, VC#, VJ# etc do not  Thanks Liviu! ) Delphi is IT for the next 7-10 years while Win32 apps will still be allowed (basically for the life span of Windows XP and Vista).

Having such a high quality tool that practically guaranteed sales in a totally open vertical market, left Borland’s newest poker-playing-turn-around-guy, Tod Nielsen – the newest in a string of CEOs dedicated to the destruction of Borland – no choice but to kill the company by dropping all code development tools 100 days after he took the job.

“We’re still all about development, but less about the creation of code,” Nielsen said.  – HUH??????

The interesting thing is that the Delphi community user base is SO frustrated with the management decisions of the last 7 years that they have thrown up their arms and said “Fine. Do it. And good riddance.” 

 Read the details:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0%2C1895%2C1922016%2C00.asp

 

Addendum – I just found out that in the fall of 2005 a Borland stock holder (the largest?) had offered Borland 125 million for their language suites.  Borland turned him down out of hand.  Now a few months later, they’ve begun to think “hmmm, that was a lot of green!  Let’s do it!”  Of course now that they are the ones wanting to make the deal, not the buyers, they’ll be lucky to get 2/3 the original offer.   Which I should be happy with I guess.  It means the people buying the IDE products will have all the more money to invest in them… 

Oh and if you are a news group reader, David “I” has been out on the groups lately trying to restore confidence in the product.

I still can’t beleive they’ve done this after such a succesful production release. But I guess you always clean your car just before you sell it, too.

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