See
Borland is about to sell the IDE DepartmentI was surprised, but I was very busy. I couldn't feel it was a good thing or a bad thing at the moment. In addition, I was very busy at work and had no time to wait and think about it. Recently I have read many comments from the bosses, such as Li Wei, aimingoo, Meng Yan, rapet, and Ling Hu. I have also noted down some of my views.
Although the actual work has been far away from Delphi, and I began to feel that it is difficult to stand out simply by taking the technical path, after all, Delphi, which has been used for many years, has a deep feeling, of course, we also hope Borland can be well along the way. To be honest, Delphi's development path in the past five years has almost never been right. Many decisions are utilitarian, but not persistent. Maybe, a public company must always consider the stock price and how to make profits. At the beginning, I wanted to blame Borland for finding some technical CEOs, but IBM's former CEO, Guo Shina, was not a technical engineer, but successfully led IBM into a new world, therefore, it is not just about the CEO. I personally think that Borland's dilemma today is related to its long product line. It cannot concentrate its strength on a certain number of core businesses, resulting in a good concept, but the actual product quality is not good. In addition, the uncertainty in decision-making is also very relevant. In addition, constant personnel changes and turbulence may also affect morale. Finally, IBM-led eclipse became the last straw to crush camels. First of all, everyone seems to have a consensus that selling the IDE department is a good thing. Rather than paying enough attention to it, we cannot get enough resources to develop, and we are often influenced by swing policies, it is better to develop independently, but there may be another way to live. Before discussing possible buyers, let's take a look at the current situation of Borland's several development tools. JBuilder has been broken down. Although it has many unique features, it has a price of tens of thousands, compared with other free Java ides with functions, Delphi is dedicated to the shrinking Win32 world. It is difficult for new developers to choose to learn and enter the Delphi world. Delphi. net? It has many features and creativity, and has been as close as possible to the Delphi code style of the old Win32. However, after all, the difference is too big. The effort invested in learning is actually similar to learning C, with a poor delphi8 ide shadow, the language selection on the DOTNET platform is self-evident. c ++ builder? It seems that bcbx has been shrinking, but it has ruined the bad quality. Currently, BCB does not know where to go and does not support DOTNET? So we can only let ourselves back to the non-dominant VxD, WDM and other driver development, without the WYSIWYG control drag part, do not know why to use it? Supporting DOTNET makes it hard to imagine what C ++ will look like and why it will compete with the next version of Visual Studio? Kylix, which has been stopped for a long time, is another creative tool. Interbase does not feel much better than other databases. Others are more general and you don't need to talk about them. After the above comments, it seems that Borland's ide can only retain a small number of old developers to maintain the old system, and it cannot attract new developers. Let's talk about the buyer. We are concerned about whether Ms will take the lead? If ms is used, it is still a good news for the time being, but I personally don't think it is possible. Unless Ms wants to quickly access Linux and Java, it does not have to rely on Borland's ide tools even with these plans. The other is that Delphi, delphi.net, BCB, and InterBase are seriously overlapped with the original MS customer base. recruiting these ide languages will only confuse the positioning of their product lines, it is wasted on integration without any benefits. Unless Ms positions VC + BCB in system development, to be honest, on DOTNET, it cannot be seen that C ++ has any advantages, and Delphi can replace the original VC location, you can develop high-end and complex background service systems. Another saying is that if MS is used for acquisition, it can attract tens of millions of original Borland users. In fact, there is no need to buy it. I guess most Borland users developed on the win platform will switch to vs. After all, for a Delphi user, transferring to C # has the lowest cost, the quickest and safest way. Next, Google? At present, Google seems to be focusing on the Internet and search-related products, so it does not feel any interest in desktop systems. Of course, if Google is rumored to support Ubuntu and will launch its own operating system, it is also possible to strengthen the development tools under the operating system. If Google is launched, it is a good news. What about IBM? IBM focuses on the enterprise market. Borland and these tools seem to have not been used with the REAL Enterprise yet. At present, an eclipse seems to be able to meet its needs, unless IBM wants to enter the traditional medium-and small-sized customer market of Ms win, buy these things, and then open-source and unify them into eclipse, well, this result is also good. Another expectation is Borland's own open source. It is estimated that the possibility is very small. As a result, open source also requires a lot of investment. It is estimated that it does not want to pay the money (or cannot pay) and just wants to make a profit as soon as possible. Secondly, the services of old customers are also a problem. It is estimated that Borland wants to get rid of this burden. There are also Novell and Adobe, which are all possible. They all need powerful development tools to support their own product lines, but it is still unknown whether to buy all of them. Oracle, Sybase, Bea, and sun are similar. Oracle's jdeveloper is based on JB and has been well-developed. However, other tools seem to be of little help to it. Sybase's PB has been declining for many years, the development tool has disappeared. The IDE that bought Borland seems to have the hope to revitalize xiongwei. BEA has long been rumored to be buying Borland, but to be honest, its interest, it should only be in Java. What about Sun? It should be focused on the Java field. I can't think of other development languages or tools. What is the use of these tools for it? its own netbeans is also good, unless it still wants to complete the impossible task-winning the first place in the Java ide market and expecting sun to buy it, the difficulty is also relatively high. There are still many unknown possibilities, hoping Borland can find a kind buyer. I hope this will not turn into a farce in the end. Wait and see. Don't be disappointed. Don't look too high !!!
