This thread is dominated by users of Borland technology, giving us an excellent insight into the stuff that has historically given Borland the edge - neat products for developers. However, by moving up market, the focus has shifted from the individual to the corporation, where - even though our technologists may wish this were not so - decisions are made differently. These decisions are what drives the market share gained by such products as Developer 2000, whose many users often have to make excuses for its lack of refinement, and MQSeries, which I have come across as a middleware solution in the most unlikely places.
From my perspective in the market (the very high end of the hardware market) scalability is the buzzword du jour. We talk about using commodity microprocessors in our big iron boxes and thus gaining the benefit of both binary compatibility with our baby cousins--the departmental servers and personal workstations--as well as the benefit of quicker time to market with the next generation of products.
I see a parallel with Borland moving into this enterprise marketspace they are pursuing. A majority of the tools vendors in that space exist only in that space. They probably have a customer base of less than 5,000 and thus are prone to be slow at adding features and functionality as well as tracking down and squashing the more obscure bugs that only show up in the field.
With Borland's much larger customer base on the low end, they are the analog of the commodity processor in the hardware market. They have a much larger customer base to wring the bugs out of the product, they are used to shorter lifecycles and their products will "scale" up from the personal PC all the way to this enterprise level that they are now persuing.
I see the visigenic acquisition as another step on the road towards making Borland tools more attractive for reasons other than this "scalable" technology. Visigenic has big name recognition and appears to be have infiltrated a lot of corporate developement shops.
If Borland is able to ride into these development shops on the coattails of visigenic, the people who actually use the tools may well be surprised by the quality of Borland's tools. With luck, that surprise will translate into good word of mouth and eventually big name recognition for Borland itself.
At least that's the way I'm hoping things will work out. |
