Borland announced plans to seek a buyer for the portion of its business associated with the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), including the award-winning Borland Developer Studio (Delphi®, C++Builder® and C#Builder®) and JBuilder® product lines.
Borland to Acquire Software Quality Company, Segue Software;
Announces Plan to Divest IDE Product Lines
I remember when they went for big enterprise and even renamed themselves "Inprise" (because "Enterprise software is where the money is"). Eventually they gave up on the idea and went back to focusing on developers.
This time they seem to be burning the bridges and getting rid of the developer tools business altogether. Which is what gave them visibility – nobody thinks of Borland as anything other as great IDEs and tools. This time they won’t be able to go back, unless the IDE product line company buys them back, or renames itself Borland when the current Borland dies.
Oh Borland, how we part ways. David Intersimone has his heartfelt take on this
Update 02/09:: Now that there’s been time for some employees and ex-employees to chime in on this, let me point you to a couple of exchanges that caught my eye:
- Ken Henderson and Allen Bauer have an interesting exchange here.
- Nick Hodges remains optimistic.
- Steve Teixera offers some more level-headed analysis.
My opinion on it? Delphi will go on. It’s very hard to kill off a development platform, especially one with such a strong following.
technorati tags: borland, ide, software, development, programming
I guess if you can’t compete by making good software, you might as well turn to Enterprise software. 🙂