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Technology Stocks : BORL: Time to BUY! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David Miller who wrote (7589)	11/19/1997 11:52:00 PM
From: Kashish King	Respond to of 10836

The obvious downside is that BORL effectively gambling with a whopping one third of the company's net worth. Microsoft is clearly going down the COM path and that's a dead end street; however, companies like Borland need to focus on the details at the developer level if they want to capitalize on this massive blunder. We need a simple, fairly broad set of business widgets which for all intents and purposes are bug free -- this can be done with ease if the correct approach is taken. These widgets must not be islands of code by coherent, interoperating components -- this should not be difficult given a competent OO design team. Each component must support runtime properties -- definitely an easy task for C++ or Java -- available in or out of any GUI building tool. Which brings me to the next requirement: a simple, interactive GUI builder which will leverage the already considerable runtime design features of each widget. If they can deliver that they will slaughter VB and anything like it. This isn't hard, it's just that incompetent and inexperienced software engineers grow on trees. What allows some to bubble to the top in a given corporation usually has zero to do with effective, successful design; rather, it's those who ship something quickly despite a ten-fold increase in maintenance and support costs that gets the promotions. The other dismal failure for Borland is support and information services. I will not use JBuilder for Java development if they don't fix that. I can get crap from Microsoft or Symantec, I don't need to third-source crap.

To: David Miller who wrote (7589)	11/20/1997 1:26:00 AM
From: Jerry Whlan	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 10836

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.