Borlands Tools Might Have a Future

By Larry O'Brien

April 15, 2006 —

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.

First, though, blunt talk: Delphi, today, is not in good shape. The Delphi language itself is well past its peak, and with its Pascal roots is on the wrong side of trends in syntax. Short of a grand rewrite creating a Delphi-in-name-only, the language has little potential for future growth. The other languages supported by the IDE—C#, Visual Basic (did you know?), Java and C++—are controlled by others.

In user experience, the IDE has been losing ground to both Visual Studio and Eclipse, and few would rank the current offering as best-in-breed, much less the industry-leading inspirations that were Borland’s stock in trade in the “Turbo” days. More tough truth: It’s hard to compete with free. Eclipse will increasingly dominate the Java world and within that world, at best, Delphi will be reduced to a niche offering—perhaps as a plug-in or perhaps settling down to a much lower market share.

Beyond Delphi, things are rosy. The most important thing going for an independent DevCo is that the industry is overdue for a shakeup in programming approaches. Object-oriented programming approaches provide guidance for structuring large applications, but “service orientation,” the closest equivalent for distributed applications, doesn’t explain, much less predict, the types of applications that characterize “Web 2.0.”

Vista just begs for new applications, and the multicore era will require new programming models (see “Under Concurrence,” Feb. 15, page 32). I reject the premise that “libraries are the new languages.” Languages matter greatly. Whether Delphi-in-name-only, Turbo Ruby or something entirely different, a great language, with a good IDE, with both native performance and support for at least one of the two major managed platforms, could be the basis for a successful company.

I suspect that the resolution to this will be known shortly and that there is a solid chance of events outpacing the printing process, so in the time-honored tradition of wild speculation, let me offer another possibility: Apple funds the new company.

If there’s one thing that Borland’s languages division has, it’s experience generating code for Intel chips. It also has expertise (although maybe a little atrophied) in creating interface libraries. The Macintosh would provide a safe harbor for the development of a next-generation IDE and language. It’s a great opportunity.

While a straight acquisition is far more likely, it is also less likely to instigate the broad changes that would be necessary for DevCo to regain its prominence. So here’s hoping for a phoenix rising from Scotts Valley.

Larry O’Brien is a technology consultant, analyst and writer. Read his blog at www.knowing.net.

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