Borland’s Tools Might Have a Future
April 15, 2006 —
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My initial reaction to the announcement that Borland was going to sell off its programming languages division was despair. The announcement did not specify a buyer and, as of this writing, no purchaser has come forward. Taken at face value, the announcement has all the earmarks of a “final clearance sale” for a product disdained by its seller.
A funny thing happened on the way to the dumpster, though. The words coming from employees and longtime Borland watchers were far more upbeat than the pro forma platitudes about “looking forward to new opportunities” that one expects. If the company’s languages division doesn’t have a secret plan in place, it sure is doing a heck of a good imitation of a group that does.
David Intersimone’s role as the head cheerleader and evangelist for Borland’s development tools goes far back into the DOS days. Although he hasn’t yet announced the day or location of the house-warming party, his attitude seems unequivocal: The Delphi technologies are not going away. “David I,” as he’s known, has always been a straight shooter, and I just don’t think he’d be talking this way, to a community with which he’s worked for two decades, if there were not a solution near at hand.
Normally, one would assume that any such rescue would come in the form of a wholesale purchase by a major player (Oracle and Novell being two obvious possibilities), but I think a wholly independent company—DelphiSoft, TurboWare, OutPrise—is a possibility as well. But if Borland corporate saw a way for a self-sufficient company (DevCo seems to be the preferred code name) to keep the balance sheet in the black, it would be spinning the division out, not selling it off.
The Delphi line is rooted in the understanding that programmers and programming languages matter. For all the talk about platforms and IDEs and life-cycle management, the evolving opinions and preferences of programmers, not managers, determine the direction of the industry.
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