I was reminded recently that Delphi was Borland Delphi first, then Inprise Delphi briefly, then back to Borland Delphi, and then more recently, CodeGear Delphi, and then after the Borland/Codegear split, it became Embarcadero Delphi.
I would love it if anybody who knows more of the real details would come along and fill me in, but from where the Delphi user sat, this is what the whole Inprise thing looked like to us:
Borland in the early days was Philipp Kahn's company.It was a software company that sold general utilities for microcomputer users.For DOS, there wasSideKick, an early "PIM" (personal information management) program for DOS, launched in 1983, the same year that TurboPascal was first launched.You may remember that TurboPascal first was a CP/M tool.Originally written for Z80 by Anders Hejlsberg, and running on a single board Zilog Z80 CPU based hobbyist computer called the NasCom, that few of us ever heard of,what became TurboPascal later was originally known as BLS Pascal. Whenthis code was ported from Z80 to 8086, and the incredibly successful TurboPascal for DOS was born.That same compiler codebase was used in the creation of Delphi 1.0 for Windows 3.0 (16 bit), and Delphi 2.0 for Windows 95 (32 bit).I started using TurboPascal around version 5.0, and remember being very excited when TurboPascal 5.5 came out, which included this new Object Oriented stuff.I believe I paid less than $100 for TurboPascal 5.5 from my campus computer store, and it came in a very large box, with a lot of very nice manuals.In the DOS era, paper manuals were an essential programming tool.Online help on an 80x25 or 80x43 EGA DOS text screen was not much of a "help" to programmers, and I relied heavily on the paper manuals while learning and using the system.
Borland sold millions of copies of TurboPascal in the DOS era.So from a humble hobby-computing market, they got big.What happens when companies succeed financially and start getting bigger?I guess they hire a lot of people, promote some of them to middle management, and generally bloat out from their humble startup days and into their days of fat.At microsoft, famously at one point, there were more than 10 levels of middle and product and senior management between each developer and the CEO.I have no inside information on life at Borland circa 1995 (Delphi 1), or when the Inprise debacle started, during the Del Yocam era, in 1998.I have heard some tales but I will not repeat them.
Instead I wish to reflect on the simple fact that by renaming yourself and abandoning your constituency, you alienate all your current customers.There were actions by Borland staffers and corporate leadership prior to 1998 that alienated some DOS and early-Windows-era customers, but the Inprise era is spectacular for the sheer ineptitude and bad timing of the move. As a person who often wonders why Delphi did not achieve more corporate traction than it did,the later JBuilder-is-the-future fiasco is still second in the list of disasters to the "Abandonment of Borland brand" inspired under Del Yocam's time leading Borland.On the internet newsgroups,and at Delphi user groups, the move to the "Inprise" name was met with shock.Why did the community even care? It's just a name, after all.
No, it wasn't. The "Inprise" name change was basically a message that "We're not that DOS era tools company anymore, and we think we're ready to move into big ticket Enterprise software".The enterprise software enterprise failed.Inprise failed. Borland failed.Later on Borland went chasing after ALM (application lifecycle management) as a new Enterprise era, and abandoned codegear, and Embarcadero picked it up for a song.
So, what is this Enterprise level tools software that every software developer who wants to build enterprise software needs? This is very much still an open question.Enterprise software development tools, if you will forgive me for answering my own question, are "Snake Oil", pure and simple. Large companies in general need all the same software development tools and functionality that medium and small companies have.Yes they have the money to buy a high end edition, if that higher edition really helps, and those higher editions exist, and yes people buy them.I am not saying that nobody buys it.I'm saying that the tools don't deliver a measurable Enterprise productivity boost that they promise.In short, I am saying that no high end $5000 development tool provides quite as much inside the box as it promises on the outside of the box and that the claims of "Enterprise" software products often outstrip what they can really deliver.
What they have that other companies do not have is (or so we hope) a large pile of cash that they are willing to part with, and additional fear and anxiety that salespeople can trade on, and receive money for for intangible deliverables like "Enterprise readiness" and "Enterprise level functionality", or best of all "Five-Nines" reliability.
It's quality sauce, performance and speed as an extra cheese topping, on your mid-market pizza, that makes your Enterprise Pizza.The word "Enterprise" is still with us, in CodeGear/Embarcadero Delphi land, as the name of an edition of Delphi.
What do the high-SKU Enterprise and Architect editions of Delphi offer me that I would pay for?Actually, very little. Now in XE4, the new database layer, AnyDAC FireDAC is actually great, and I would almost buy Enterprise or Architect to get it. Almost.
What else?I don't currently like DataSnap much, but it is definitely the most important and most valuable thing that comes with Delphi Enterprise and Architect.If Embarcadero could improve DataSnap to the point that people like me want to buy it, that would probably make it worth buying.
What else, else?Well there's the blobby-gram builder tools, and the code metrics.Guess what. I think blobby grams are useless, and the code metrics feature is inferior to the $99 Peganza Pascal Analyzer. You've got to do better to earn my dollars for those features.
I really do want to see the Enterprise and Architect editions succeed in the free market and sell lots of copies.That will do as much to keep Delphi going and growing into the future, as having it become more popular would.But Delphi is facing a clear and present danger;New user adoption levels are so low, and the number of publicly findable Delphi jobs is at a deadly near-zero level.Developers cannot find Delphi jobs, and Delphi employers cannot find Delphi developers.As the software development manager and team implementation leader at a very small Delphi company, I am painfully aware of both sides of this equation.I am a developer, and I try to lead a small software team through releases and bug fixing.
The way out of Delphi's current "No Jobs/No Developers" bind, when competing against a free Visual Studio express edition has got to be the opposite direction to the direction that the leaders during the Inprise period at Borland chose.
I see a considerable pressure coming out of Delphi's product management to drive the dwindling number of Delphi faithful up the curve towards Enterprise and Architect.I say, most of us are not budging.Taking away features from Delphi Pro will only hurt Delphi and Embarcadero, terminate Software Assurance agreements and alienate the small shops that still use Delphi.
What needs to happen is a return to the Borland/DOS era product market and reach.Somehow Embarcadero needs to find a way to sell 30 million copies of $99 to $399 products, either in one lump sum, or even as an annual $99 rental.The future of Delphi depends on it.
Was the right move? I can't say as I don't know the sales and revenue from it, but I can say that it was not enough to make a dent in the NoJobs/NoDevelopers issue.There needs to be something else done to address the perception that Delphi is a dead end. It's still the best technology out there for building applications.Unfortunately, it's perceived as a a career-limiting and company-growth -limiting move. That perception needs to be addressed, and changed, with main force.The cross-platform focus (iOS and then Android) is definitely going to add something to the Delphi toolbox that will attract new people, but something needs to be done to get more developers onto the platform.A new generation of Delphi developers, these ones should be under 30 instead of graybeards over 40 like me.
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