This just in: Borland sold their programming tools division, CodeGear, to none other than Embarcadero Technologies. Makers of cross-platform database tools, for God’s sake. Face it, folks: Borland is no more.
It all started with Turbo Pascal, an amazing tool that introduced me to programming. Then I switched to Turbo C, Turbo C++, Borland C++, which at that point became garbage, so I abandoned it for Microsoft C++ (which at that point was somewhat less of a garbage.)
Being pummelled by the competition, Borland decided that the best strategy to show they were really enterprisey was to rebrand. The world-famous brand Borland became “Inprise” (WTF?)
Oh, they also bought dBASE at the time when it became garbage, too (the linked article compares it to Windows Vista, which is only fair.) The garbage levels in the company started to raise. The greatest tool they ever produced, Delphi, became garbage too, because Borland/Inprise decided that a tool which produced the smallest and fastest running Windows programs in a fraction of time of any other tool on the market was not enough. Not enterprisey enough, perhaps. Or maybe their marketing folks just sucked. So they said, “let’s compete with Microsoft on their own turf”, and produced Delphi for .NET which nobody wanted. Then there was Kylix (sort of Delphi for Linux), which nobody noticed.
I participated in beta testing of Borland’s new Builder X, or whatever it was called, a Java-based multiplatform multilanguage IDE. It sucked big time. They abandoned it.
And so it went: Borland became Inprise, which, after someone pulled their head from their @$$ for a short while, became Borland again, which saw it impossible to compete with Visual Studio and produced an offspring called CodeGear, which gave birth to Delphi for PHP (which again nobody noticed) and at the end of the line was sold to the first bidder foolish enough to pay money for it.
I firmly believe that selling CodeGear to Embarcadero is the last nail in the coffin of once great developer company (and I don’t mean Embarcadero.) I had to work with RapidSQL (the “Rapid” part of the name is a cruel joke, I’m sure.) It is horrendous. The interface is clearly done in Delphi, which shows that you can screw up your programs even when using great tools. The performance is not great, to say the least, and the damned thing crashes regularly, or fails to launch. And now they must be thinking that by buying the company that did their tools they will somehow magically improve their products. Good luck with that. One thing I don’t understand: how they get huge enterprises (banks etc.) to use their software? Their marketing division must be really great.
Anyway, sad story, really.
P.S. I wrote this from memory, so if there are any factual errors, please do comment and let me know.
Yikes Turbodad! I hear you on all fronts my friend. I wanted to personally reach out and indicate a couple of things to you, you may not realize and give you a regular direct channel to me and our product development.
When the team and I looked at the prospectus to buy CodeGear we truly got excited. Why? To begin, we have a CEO who had his entre career started with a $49 copy of Turbo Pascal. We also have a developer-oriented culture here that takes pride in developing software to enhance productivity (I’ll get to the RapidSQL stuff in a minute!) for those that have to face databases and get their jobs done across a wide array of platforms/SQL nuances. So in comes this prospectus and we see an immense body of talent, a business we can make profitable, and a re-birth of a company that wants to serve the development directly which clearly had not been able to do effectively for the last few years. To stress a point, we see Embarcadero now…or specifically as of the close on June 30th…as an independent purveyor of cost effective tooling ranging from community editions to enterprise editions providing an unique capability to touch more infrastructure than anyone in the industry…e.g….Java, RoR, C++, Delphi, PHP, etc through to Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, SQL Server, etc etc. In fact, we will be moving forward with CodeGear and “DatabaseGear” divisions that will offer sophisticated integration points where it can increase productivity.
Anyways, we’re here to invest in what we think is a very storied and amazing company with great products.
As it relates to some of your history with the Embarcadero products, man WE HEAR YOU! I have been with the company for (shockingly) 12 years building product, namely ER/Studio. But like most companies, maybe even yours, you tend to lose focused and when you lose focus things go awry….and can be demonstrably noticed in your product. Pre-privatization, we admit that our identity was being lost. It’s tough being a public company with ~50-60mm in revenue. Too small. The pressure is immense. Post privatization, things changed. How? Well we were re-invested within. How? Well, take for example R & D (including QA!). We went from roughly 4-6 FTE’s on a product like RapidSQL to around 20+ directly on the product. How? Growth in emerging places like Romania where we have gone since going private from 0 to over 100 employees dedicated to developing and testing our products. (FYI, Rapid and DBArtisan which share a same code foundation are actually not Delphi! It’s all C++ with some .Net foundation and in fact Java at the core if you can believe it). To the future, we (CodeGear and Embarcadero) have collectively embraced the momentum of Eclipse…not just for the Java development community mind you, but instantiating the framework for many of our emerging technologies moving forward. It will provide us some significant usability advantages, plug-and-play between products to create entirely new packages and new price points and installation on tons of OS’s from Windows to Lin/Unix to Mac.
Anyways, I am rambling here but I just want you to realize we here you and would love to have you helping shape and push this new collective company forward. We’re excited and developers should be as well.
All my best, Greg Keller VP-Product Management Embarcadero Technologies
— Greg Keller · 9 May 2008, 02:58 · #
Thank you for your reply. I'm sorry if I came across a bit harsh, but I started my programming career with Turbo Pascal 3 and it felt sad to see how a great company was being ruined by inept management, and what it came to.
Congratulations on your acquisition, and all power to you, sir. But remember: you now own a significant piece of computing history, and it is your task to make sure it doesn't remain just history.
Regarding RapidSQL, it suffers from the common problem that plagues all Windows software and especially enterprise-level tools. Generally, pardon me, they suck. I don't really care what foundation a tool is built on, as long as it works fast and is usable, which means a good UI. You need to seriously work on RapidSQL in this department. You need to care about GUI. (For example, look at the Mac OS. Apple and Mac developers do care.) Switching to Eclipse won't just fix all your problems magically.
Also, from my experience outsourcing can be very detrimental to the quality of software product and especially the GUI, just because overseas teams don't really care for the software.
I wish you the best of luck in your efforts. Let's hope CodeGear legacy doesn't end here.
— admin · 9 May 2008, 08:32 · #
Kylix was before Delphi for .Net.
In other cases you are absolutely right. Borland had to make tools for developers instead of enterprise stuff and other experiments with excrements.
— KARPOLAN · 16 May 2008, 06:56 · #
— Simeon · 17 May 2008, 06:41 · #
— Ja · 7 August 2008, 19:12 · #