Short Takes: June 1, 2009

By SD Times News Team

June 1, 2009 —

Buh-bye Borland
When a company promotes its CFO to acting CEO instead of advancing a sales or product executive, that’s a good sign that the company’s going to be sold soon.

That’s what I wrote on Jan. 8 in “Borland back in the frying pan,” after the news that CEO Todd Nielsen had jumped ship to join VMware. It’s taken a mere four months for that predication came true.

The news: Micro Focus, known for its COBOL tools, is buying Borland for about US$75 million. That’s a dollar per share, a juicy premium over the company’s average-day closing price of 60 cents per share.

SD Times publisher Ted Bahr summed it up nicely in a Twitter tweet: “Don’t mourn the sale to Micro Focus. Borland has been dead for years, and the products you loved were bought by Embarcadero a few months ago.”

The Embarcadero connection is that Borland sold its tools subsidiary, CodeGear, to the database tool maker back in May 2008.

Micro Focus will be a good steward of Borland’s mishmash of application life-cycle management, mainly cobbled together from acquisitions. It will be a better steward than Borland's previous chief executives, Nielsen and former CFO Erik Prusch. The question is, of course, how much impact these products will have in the marketplace, even under new management. Borland had become a very minor player in ALM.

Micro Focus also purchased some products from Compuware. To quote from Compuware’s press release, Compuware “has signed an agreement for Micro Focus to acquire assets from Compuware's Quality Solutions product line, including development, sales and customer-support teams, as well as specific technologies. The $80 million transaction is expected to close this quarter and will impact about 330 employees.”

Bottom line: Borland is gone, and good riddance. Ted Bahr is right: Few should mourn its passing. The differentiation of the product sets is now clear: If you want ALM suites, go to Micro Focus. If you want application performance management tools, go to Compuware. And if you want developer tools, go to Embarcadero. — Alan Zeichick

.NET Micro Framework moves elsewhere in Microsoft
The .NET Micro Framework has been moved to the developer division of Microsoft. I regret that some good people will lose their jobs in the transition, but I think that the reorganization will ultimately be good for the platform. It makes sense for the team that develops .NET to oversee a derivative of the platform.

With that change, Microsoft is establishing a community effort for the development of the product by allowing access to its runtime source code, drivers and object model. Microsoft will keep the final say on the management of its source code, but it will provide developers with tools and guidance to contribute to the project. Let the embedded market decide its fate vs. Linux. I just hope that Microsoft nurtures the community effort instead of letting the Micro Framework wither on the vine. — David Worthington

Benford's Law applies to primes, too
Evidently, in naturally occurring data sets like logarithms, the lengths of rivers and matrices of stock prices, Benford's Law applies. The law states that in these number sets, around 30% of the numbers will begin with 1. As you increase that digit to 9, the chance of a number beginning with it decreases. It doesn't really make any sense, but I've been told is applies in non-base-10 systems as well.

Freaky though it is, it would seem that it applies to prime numbers as well. A research team in Spain discovered this fact recently and is claiming it as the first recognizable pattern among primes. My big question now is, what on Earth does this mean for encryption? — Alex Handy

Doc…Doc…Doc…Goose!
As in my goose, which was cooked recently by Microsoft and it’s relatively new, oh-so-lovely DOCX format.

Honestly, when I see that “x” tagged onto a Microsoft Word file, it might as well be crossbones telling me that I’m about to handle poison!

I just moved into a new apartment and had to transfer a very important document for Hofstra University onto my laptop, which has Microsoft Word 2003. Unknowingly, I put the document from my home computer—equipped with Word 2007—into an e-mail.

When I got my laptop set up at the new apartment, I realized my blunder and couldn’t open the DOCX file with the older version of Word. Fortunately, I was able to download the Docx Compatibility Pack, but not without a scare.

When I tried to open the file after downloading the pack, the file couldn’t be read, and I got one of those super-frustrating white sheets of illegible symbols. Once again, my panic meter was rising.

However, a simple restart of my computer kicked the compatibility pack into gear, and all was well. — Jeff Feinman

Related Search Term(s): Short Takes

Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33503

Short Takes: March 15, 2010 .NET uncertainty, startup foolishness, making Web apps stand out, and the Olympics are the topic du jour

Short Takes: February 15, 2010 The editors discuss a mobile White House, data vulnerability, the digs at Cambridge for Microsoft, and muzak for coders

Short Takes: January 15, 2010 The editors take on using video games as a springboard for programming and agile development's long history

Add comment

Name*
Email*
Country

Comment
Preview

News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>

Download Current Issue
ISSUE 3/15/2010 PDF

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Receive the print Edition?

Google Code turns 5
Google Code Turns 5, and adds a Paxos Algorithm to make the system more stable and reliable.
03/17/2010 11:16 AM EST

Test your Visual Studio 2010 know-how
Microsoft is offering free beta certification exams for Visual Studio 2010.
03/17/2010 11:08 AM EST

Microsoft lifts the hood on IE9
Microsoft is previewing IE9.
03/16/2010 01:10 PM EST