Borland stops its IDE business
11 February, 2006I always wondered how Borland were making money from their IDEs given such strong competition in the Java and .NET markets, and of course Delphi has only ever been a minor player, it turns out that they were wondering the same thing.
I actually feel quite sad – we were taught programming using Delphi at University, and JBuilder was my first Java IDE. Years later, I was using C++Builder now and again, and I was using Kylix to develop cross-platform native applications. No longer.
It’s always a shame to see a competitor in a largely unchallenged marketplace (namely the .NET IDE market) drop out, and I imagine that for most developers, this will be the last time they hear the Borland name.
Comments
amillionlittlepieces
12 February, 2006 at 10:56
They’ll be alright… they recognised that the industry was polarising around Eclipse and VS ages ago and have been focussing on acquisitions to move them into different markets.
Their other products (CaliberRM, StarTeam, Borland Together) are damn good and they have good integration with Eclipse / VS, as well as the Mercury toolset. In terms of requirements, config mgmt, UML they are going strong.
They also just purchased a project management solutions company and are releasing ‘tempo’ at some point that covers this.
In the overall application lifecycle (I.e. not IDEs)- Borland are WAY ahead of their competitors and lots of big organisations are buying into them.