Borland closes at historic low

2/29/2008 9:43:05 AM #

I do feel sorry for the CodeGear and Delphi guy's. I have used Delphi since version 1 and TP before that. My last version was D2006. These days I am exclusive Visual Studio and .NET. Delphi is still the best tool for native development but unless something good happens soon I can see a fire sale coming up.

Craig

2/29/2008 6:29:03 PM #

Steve,

I do not watch it. Too painful. I started using TP when Philippe had his office over the Jaguar repair shop in SV.  And, dare I say it, all these years after a very old NDA? I was introduced to Delphi when it was Wasabi. Pascal is so natural to me that I find it painful to attempt another language.

However, the job scene in Pascal/Delphi is DOA. And recent changes in the tool offerings have not made much sense to me. Making the Delphi IDE into a clone of VS was one such. The massive redesign of the tool palette was another. But the decision to drop C# from CodeGear Studio? Insane. I understand that it was not really supported, and I still consider it insane. Now when I want or need C#, I have no choice but to open VS!

Anyway, I own no stock in Borland, and though I have seen the fluctuations and general downtrend over the years, it has not affected my pocketbook, only my morale. Borland is not the first company I have seen that had an intensely loyal customer base and threw it away. And yes, they actively threw it away, as the board installed one bad leader after another, rather transparently in search of a buyer, and the short-term gains to be had, regardless of the damage to the company and its products.

Corporate management tends to get what it earns. For some it means jail terms, as we saw in the wake of WorldCom. For others, it simply means another carcass on the waste heap of PC history.

For me, the big loss is in what might have been. I'll always have D7, and I'll use it until the OS no longer permits it. (And the way Vista is working, it loooks as though many of us will be on XP for years to come!)

Bill Meyer

2/29/2008 7:54:34 PM #

Some thing are too cold to get it. Reality use to be one of these.

Once you face reality bits like this, you have choices. At least in last report we could see that Borland was losing money but it was compensating part of this loses with CodeGear's revenues in particular. After seeing this historical prices chart, one could think several (mostly simple) things:

1. Almost every price raise seems to coincide with a Delphi release.

2. Delphi and its releases were obviously attached to Borland fate anywhere in time but not now. Neither Delphi nor RAD Studio 2007, nor even 3rdRail, JBuilder 2007, Blackfish SQL, Delphi for PHP have been of some help to actual Borland financial crisis.

Just a personal thought: The Borland desicion to be a follower of MS just make their (and affected ours) way to actual crisis.  How could they think that being a simple competitor IDE would work? I think Borland/CodeGear tend to fear of Microsoft rage too much, they seems to keep self defending with the argument that Borland/CodeGear is just a tiny company under the MS grace.

I think that Kylix was a better effort, maybe not enough, but it could have had a better outcome: regained prestige. Or is exactly this effort the one that started the fall?

Or maybe this could never have a different finale? anyway, waht is really important now: is there a way to turn this crisis into an improvement opportunity? is there any chance for CodeGear to succeed again?

Salvador Gomez Retamoza

3/6/2008 11:18:16 PM #

I do watch the stock a bit too. I was quite surprised how low it has dropped.

corbin

3/7/2008 12:49:21 AM #

Hi Salvador,
All great questions. I wish I knew.

Hey Corbin,
It's dropped another 8% in the days since this post and astounding, at least to me, 70% since my last day on June 28th, 2007! It's like watching a car wreck and knowing the passengers. It's sad.

Steve Trefethen

3/17/2008 3:47:21 AM #

I would be sad to see delphi and Borland disappear from the development market.  Borland has always been able to produce good compilers and IDE's that in a sense showed Microsoft how it should be done.
Its seems there have been some bad business decisions in the past few years that have cost Borland dearly, but there is a substantial userbase here in the real world that would like to leverage existing code and practices into the future.  
With common sense I cant see why borland cant regain much of its lost market share.  The major capability issues seem to be bug free IDE, native 64bit support, and a solid migration path from win32 VCL to native 64bit and VCL .NET.  Some of this work is already done.

A critical issue is 3rd party components - allowing easy development and integration of 3rd party components has been a real strength of delphi.  
Would it be difficult for Borland /codegear to make it a priority to actively encourage and promote 3rd party component migration to and development in the new 64bit and .NET environments ?

Richard

Richard Blakers