Borland Cuts Out Its Own Heart

Today brings an announcement that was shockingly expected. Yes, you read it right. I think at some point I figured something like this would happen, but it didn't make it any less of a shock to wake up and read that it had actually happened. Borland is going to spin off its IDE business. In medical terms, CEO Tod Nielsen has decided that the way to save the patient was to donate its heart to someone else: really good news for the heart, a little dicey for the patient.

Now, I've read some of the press accounts and commentaries by other people about this. Many of them are written to impress the guys in big boardrooms whose ties have long since cut off any creative blood from reaching their brains. In plain English, the suits think they have ejected those pesky coders once and for all from Borland. Last time I remember this happening was when Apple decided that it had outgrown a certain guy named Steve Jobs and wanted to hire a suit named John Sculley. Everyone knows how well THAT worked out for Apple.

Now Tod Nielsen is fully free to cozy up to his old friends at Microsoft without potential competitive issues getting in the way. He can use Visual Studio and Eclipse as a vehicle to get his ALM offerings in the door with large companies. And maybe it'll work. It's the same mentality that says "maybe the alligator will eat me last". Certainly cozying up to Microsoft and simultaneously trying to make it look like you're Eclipse-friendly CAN work, at least in the short term. On the other hand, by keeping the name "Borland", Tod has ensured another major identity crisis for the company by taking it down the Inprise road again.

In some ways, I'm actually relieved that the IDE's won't have the Borland name, much as that nostalgic part of me sheds a tear for its loss along with everything that the name "Borland" once represented. If I had a nickel for how many times people have said to me "Borland? Are they still around? Didn't they used to make a neat little Pascal compiler?".....

So maybe a change of venue will help the tools get evaluated on their own merits, instead of having the baggage of Borland/Inprise/Visigenics/etc looming over their heads.

As long as Delphi and the other IDE's lived under the Borland name, Borland was NOT going to push them. In this, the Borland executives are right. Delphi developers everywhere have known they were sitting on one on of the best kept secrets in the industry, a RAD IDE that actually let you (gasp) port your Win32 code to .NET, without re-writing it all (someone please get smelling salts for the Visual Basic guy who just passed out. I don't want him missing anything I'm saying here).

So, this is a good thing, at least it will be as long as Borland leaves the marketing folks who have been writing the Delphi ads (what few there were) behind! I think the only fitting punishment for them is to have to market the ALM tools. Meanwhile, the IDE group might actually get under a new company and decide that it's high time someone stood up to Microsoft's Visual Studio and exposed a few of its warts (oops. Are there some of those smelling salts left? The C# guy over there needs a sniff now!) Yes, Microsoft's Visual Studio has its warts. And its only real meaningful competition has been the Borland IDE's. The engineers have done some wonderful things with them, but most of the world is ignorant of them because Borland has relied on guerilla marketing to spread the word. That's not the Borland that used to compete nose to nose with Microsoft without backing down. Some of Borland's ad campaigns in the past were edgy and unafraid, and they captured the free and independent spirits of developers everywhere. Without that presence in the market, Microsoft has pushed a lot of other peoples' technology out the door and made it sound like it was their idea in the first place. My hope is that the new IDE company makes the development and marketing effort to show that we are not all lemmings who bark and clap on cue like trained seals (If you've ever been to a local msdn event, you know what I mean: these people never clap or cheer or otherwise show any sign of being alive unless a) they are thrown t-shirts and other freebies, and b) they are specifically ASKED to ("How about these snippets?? Pretty cool, huh?!" -- Most Borland events were not lacking in actual enthusiasm by people who knew that the presenters GOT IT).

Anyway, right now the Delphi airplane is encountering turbulence. One can look out the window and the wings are bouncing up and down, your coffee won't stay on the tray, and you feel at any minute you might suddenly plunge to your death, no matter how illogical such conclusions are. But then the turbulence passes and you realize it was just an invevitable part of flying.

Delphi and the other Borland IDE's will now be flying free. And we'll all get through this turbulence. Just fasten your seatbelt, order the adult beverage of your choice, take a deep breath, relax, and say to yourself calmly "the plane will not fall out of the sky, the plane will not fall out of the sky..."

Randy