Craig Stuntz’s Weblog

By now most programmers will have heard that Borland intends to sell its programming and database products. Lots of people have commented, so I’ll not repeat the basics here. Every Borland employee I’ve heard speak on the issue, in public or private, has thus far been quite happy about the announcement.

Most of the reaction of the Borland community has also been very positive. There’s a lot we don’t know right now, and people aren’t being shy about speculating on who a buyer might be and what it means for the products, but I haven’t seen the newsgroups this excited about something since Delphi 2006 shipped.

A lot of people seem to be using the vagueries of the announcement as a means of asserting that "they were right all along." Never mind that they’re all saying different things. People who think that Delphi has been improving recently see the announcement as further opportunity for the product. People who think Delphi couldn’t possibly compete with Visual studio see this as evidence. People who find newsgroup postings by TeamB members factually inconvenient still continue to wish for our demise. (Sorry, folks, we’re going to the new company with the products, it seems.) Those who thought Coates was on the right track with his buyout and breakup offer last year see it as materializing in a different shape. Etc., etc. Funny how a vague but exciting situation tends to vindicate anyone who looks at it, isn’t it? Shiny things tend to act like mirrors.

So much rests on who the buyer will be. As long as it’s not a software graveyard I think Delphi and InterBase will continue to have a bright future. Instead of spending a lot of time looking into a crystal ball, I’d like to look at the present for a moment.

One thing which was interesting about he announcement is that, all of the sudden, InterBase has moved from the application middleware group to developer tools. I think this could be a good thing for InterBase; it never really seemed to have any synergy with the rest of the middleware tools, and I’ve long felt that Borland could do a better job marketing it to developers. (Hint: Unrestricted developer edition like most other DB servers offer.).

David Intersimone and Sriram Balasubramanian from InterBase R&D discussed this during the BDN Radio chat yesterday (you should really listen if you’re at all interested in what’s going on at Borland right now):

DavidI: In the past InterBase was included in the developer products but was in a different product group from the IDE or developer products. Now InterBase is part of this new entity that will be spun off, this new company. And so maybe just a few words about InterBase, maybe you can assure people that InterBase is still being worked on for the people user InterBase, love InterBase, license it, deploy it….

Sriram: As you all know InterBase is a very mature product and there are many customers who are using it in different kinds of applications. …Over the past decade Delphi has been a major area of introduction of InterBase… in terms of customers using Delphi to create InterBase applications. And then JBuilder came along, so it’s a product which is used in different environments, be it Delphi or Java applications. As you all might have heard at BorCon last year we released our roadmap for the coming couple of years, with regard to releasing the next versions of InterBase over the next two years. So we have exciting things lined up to be worked on and we look forward to a bright future. We definately know there is a lot of demand for the technology; we also know there are a lot of customers who depend on the technology and we have been hearing good things, so we have every reason to believe that we are developing the right things for the customers.

Also of note was a rejection of the public speculation that Delphi, InterBase, or any of the other products would be sold separately:

DavidI: There’s been several questions about would it be better to split all sorts of pieces, and we’ve made the decision as a company to put all of these products and technologies together into a company to attract investors, buyers, and to have it be a company. That was a decision and that’s what we’re executing on.

Allen Bauer: Unless somebody offers like $10 billion just for Delphi. We might consider that.

All: (Laughter)

While this is in many ways huge news, and while I have my fingers crossed that a good buyer will be found, for the time being it looks like business as usual. The Delphi and InterBase guys have all stated in public and in private that they’re continuing to develop the products in accordance with the public roadmaps discussed in the past.

On the other hand, I’m a little saddened at what I see as a missed opportunity. Breaking up the company really hampers and maybe ends any chance Borland had for true innovation in bringing together ALM and developer tools. As someone who considers StarTeam as much an IDE as Delphi, I had been hoping for great things from Borland in this arena, and while I still do, I think that the "new company" and "Borland" have lost a competitive advantage that uniquely positioned them against much better-funded rivals (read: IBM and Microsoft). But having the tools is not enough, you have to be able to bring them together in a new way. And while Borland clearly had the technical capacity to do this, they don’t seem to have made it work from a business standpoint. That’s a pity, I think.

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