Borland now down 50% since June 28th

12/4/2007 6:26:21 PM #

As someone said in CodeGear newsgroup that it is a better time to acquire Borland + CodeGear than February, 2006.

Li Yang

12/4/2007 6:28:07 PM #

To aquired Borland + CodeGear at this time woud be proving the old saying that a fool and his money are soon parted.

I.P. Nichols

12/4/2007 6:29:04 PM #

Much as I have always liked Delphi, I find myself pushed more and more in the direction of C#. I have always avoided VC++ (life is too short), but use it when I must (mainly for DLLs). But the increasing cost of the Delphi product, and the decreasing size of the development community, as well as the near total absence of jobs for Delphi coders, all make it necessary to look elsewhere.

I have spent the last few months working to provide Delphi support for an MPEG-2 encoder board. The vendor claims to support Delphi, but offers only one (mostly useless) page of text in their help file under the heading of "Developing with Delphi". Much of the pain in getting this done has come from three things: poor docs from the vendor, poor Delphi (COM) docs from Borland (D7), and the near total lack of a Delphi presence in the world at large. The vendor has no one on staff who knows anything about Delphi, and knows of no customers using Delphi. And the developer who was there when they wrote the minimal claim of Delphi support is long gone.

It is clear from the vendor's docs, and from the work in which the tech support guy is engaged, that C# would have made this a cakewalk. First, because the language provides some clean mechanisms, but also because the support tech is working in C# himself, and has often offered snippets in C# to illustrate his suggestions.

My client has a large existing app in Delphi, but it is not clear to me how much longer it will remain practical to support that. Simple support is one thing, but adding support for new devices, when those are supported only by COM or DirectShow, is something altogether different.

Bill Meyer

12/4/2007 6:37:13 PM #

So, Steve, how to do you explain it? It's not because of you departure from CodeGear. But it was because of what?

Roman

12/4/2007 6:59:12 PM #

Li,
  As I.P. Nichols stated I'm not sure a company that has fallen so far, so fast could in any way be considered an attractive buyout target. Something is fundamentally wrong with the business and that makes it very hard to be attractive.

Bill,
  Your story is very similar to what I found when I was making my decision to part ways. I saw many similar stories and user group disappearing etc.

Roman,
  I think the explanation is pretty simple, the lack of finding and growing new markets. IMO, Delphi's retrenchment in Win32 is a risky proposition and played a part in my decision to leave. While attending Google Developer Day (I was the only member of the Delphi team to do so) it was obvious to me that my focus at work wasn't in the right place and it made me uncomfortable and helped me with my decision.

Steve Trefethen

12/4/2007 9:09:25 PM #

It's sad, Steve, because in many ways, I still find Delphi the most productive tool I have. On the other hand, I can't ignore the factors I listed earlier, or the improvements MS has made to the VS IDE. And since the Delphi/RAD Studio IDE has aped to a large degree the VS IDE in layout, at the IDE level, it has to be a matter of productivity, pure and simple. The IntelliSense actions have become adaptive in very productive ways.

I still use Delphi for Win32, and probably always will. But I will do work for .NET, as well, and on that side, VS with C# is pretty attractive.

Bill Meyer

12/5/2007 9:16:38 AM #

Is it a historical minimum?

Kryvich

12/5/2007 3:18:15 PM #

Kryvich,
  If not, it has to be very close.

Steve Trefethen

12/5/2007 7:10:16 PM #

Looking here:
www.stockmarketenews.com/.../charts?qm_page=63733">Chart

It does appear to be an historical minimum. The only time it has been near that level was in the second half of 1999. Also note that the site offers a 20 year -- or for Borland, 17 year -- chart.

Bill Meyer

12/7/2007 7:41:43 AM #

sec.gov/.../f35962orsv3.htm

My English is not so good to understand it. Is it means that Borland to be sold for $200 mln?

Kryvich