The Sale of Delphi, A Brighter Future?

On February, 2006 Borland announced that it plans to seek a buyer for its IDE product lines including: “Delphi, C++Builder, C#Builder, JBuilder (and Peloton), InterBase, JDataStore, nDataStore, Kylix”. You can read the announcement here.

Response to the announcement, from both developers and Borland personnel, has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s no secret that these outstanding products, with such a loyal following, have never received the focus and proper marketing they merit. With this in mind, there’s no doubt that attention from a new company could be a big plus. While there’s also reason for concern, for even the most prudent, there’s a clear path forward.

Before I share my thoughts, a little recent history: over the past few months, I’ve presented the Borland Roadshow to over 100 developers in four cities. Of all the Roadshows that I’ve delivered, starting years ago with Delphi 4; I’ve never seen the excitement for Delphi that I observed this time. I’ve also never seen so many people who had already bought the product or who were planning on buying it. Many of the purchases were being planned by larger companies with several developers.

The reasons for the excitement aren’t hard to understand. For the first time with Delphi 2006, Borland presented developers with a formidable alternative to Microsoft’s Visual Studio. With it, developers can deliver .NET applications, just like the competitive product. But, Delphi 2006 also has the touches that developed so much product loyalty over the years.

From the same IDE, developers can build Win32 applications, access almost any type of database using one of several excellent connection mechanisms and use an outstanding set of life cycle management tools (Version Control, Modeling, ECO, etc.). Who else offers this kind of power?

Prior to Delphi 2006, Delphi for .NET hadn’t sufficiently matured. While earlier versions (Delphi 8 and Delphi 2005) deserve to be lauded for valiant effort, neither had the polish needed for major development projects.

The most significant downside to Borland’s announcement is that it may not be good strategy. There’s no question that Borland has created, aside from the consensus optimism, short term uncertainty. This uncertainty may derail purchases by the many companies currently contemplating a .NET IDE. Worse yet, the uncertainty will only grow with the amount of time that the “For Sale” sign remains up. Let’s hope they already have a buyer in mind. Hearsay indicates they do.

Given the uncertainty, how should a prudent manager or developer move forward? Let’s do a worst case analysis and assume that Borland is purchased by a company that fails to capitalize on its potential.

For existing Delphi projects, there probably isn’t a substantial impact whether they’re converted now or converted later. Since chances are good that the worst case won’t happen, nothing is lost by maintaining the status quo until things become clearer.

But what about new projects? Regardless of current events, C# should be the language of choice. While listing the reasons is beyond the scope of this article, Delphi developers should be reassured that they’ll have no problem quickly picking it up (they’ll have more trouble learning to use the .NET library, instead of the VCL). Beyond the primary reasons to use C# and in the unlikely event that the worst case happens, the work required to move form one IDE to another will be minimized.

There’s no doubt that it’s in Borland’s best interest to make Delphi as valuable as possible while they wait on suitors. To that end, the Borland development team is continuing work on a soon to be released Delphi version update. There’s every reason to believe that additional work will continue unabated until a sale is finalized.

In any case, the picture will become much clearer over the next year or so. The best summation that I’ve seen comes from David Intersimone, Borland Vice President, Developer Relations and Chief Evangelist, in his message to developers. Referring to his feeling about a move to another company he said: “I am moving forward as part of the new company with a huge smile on my face and a small tear in my eye.” Hopefully, he’ll have an even bigger smile sometime soon.

About the author: Rick Ross is President of Ross Software Corporation, a software development and training firm based in Dublin, Ohio.