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

To: shane forbes who wrote (9211)	3/3/1998 1:49:00 PM
From: Robert Graham	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 10836

I hope Borland has dramatically improved their quality control. I used to be a fan of Borland's since the time Microsoft came out with their first version of Visual C. The Microsoft product at that time was slow and buggy to the point of being unusable. It was essentially a beta product being sold on the market. The Borland product was fast, no (significant) bugs, more functional, and priced very inexpensively to attract business. Borland later would encourage frequent upgrades, but they always made the upgrade worthwhile in providing a significant improvement to the level of useful functionality including the being the first to package the source code to the C run time libraries with their product. I have recently returned to the Borland platform due to a project that I am working on related to the use of ActiveMovie technology. The Borland Developer Suite since version 5 has been a great disappointment. The are many bugs, so many that I would call this product "beta" quality, and this is after a couple of bug patches that I have applied and a product upgrade to bring the product to V5.02. Here I will outline some of the problems and inadequacies of this product. The debugger has problems debugging between processes. I have discovered a way in making their product work in this way, but I had to end up purchasing SoftICE from Numega in order to find a workable solution to this problem. Next I went to access a hardware I/O port in Win95 which is supported by the Visual C++ compiler to find that the Borland compiler does not support _inp() and _outp() functions to allow for this. So I went to inline assembly. This is when I found out that the built in support for inline assembly was only avaiable for their Win3.1 version of their compiler, and this required me to purchase a separate TurboAssembler V5.0 product to accomplish this, a feature they advertise as available with their C++ compiler. Unfortunately I could not find any mail order and local retailer to have this product on their shelf. Borland is moving their warehouse from California to Georgia now and can only promise delivery not in anything less that a 3 week time frame. So I had to order Microsoft Visual C++. Microsoft Visual C++ has built in support for assembly without having topurchase their seperate assembler product. Next, Borland advertises support for Microsoft MFC. I talked to a project manager at my client that has had the experience of having to obtain the source to MFC and rebuild this source in the Borland environment before he could use MFC with the Borland compiler. It looks like Borland provides support for MFC only if you provide the source. Finally, I found that I could not compile the code that uses ActiveMovie components written from the Microsoft SDK. Compiling this code in Microsoft Visual C++ is a much more workable solution. So I am now recommending that any future development for this project be done with Microsoft Visual C++. Now I will talk about their C++ Builder product which is actually showing some promise. Borland comes out with an innovative and useful visual development environment as a product called Delphi. Do you think this product was the result of through their leadership part of their ongoing efforts to remain a competetive business? No. From what I hear, this product was a effort that was initiated on the side to normal business by a product group. When Borland found itself in the position of having no product in the pipeline, which demonstrates very inept management, they looked around and through outright good fortune on their part found this application that could be turned into a product. The management team ran with it. This explains why they would introduce a Pascal based product in a non-Pascal market that is primarily based on C/C++. Why else would they think to perform such an obvious error in product marketing? The product was initially given good reviews but its Pascal orientation kept the product from being accepted in the mainstream product development efforts of businesses. A few years later they came out with a C++ based version of the product. No evident sense of urgency here even though they had a business on their hands that was not able to be competative in the marketplace and in serious financial trouble. I have been using this product for a few months now. It has its idiosyncrasies and bugs, but in its first incarnation, it is a much better quality product than their Borland C++ Developer Suite which is at version 5.02 now after having been through three series of bug patches. Unfortunatley I think this is much too little much too late for this company to survive. This product is still nowhere close to the development environemnt provided by their C++ compiler including some of the more basic functionality that I find important to have in any development environment. And now they skipped from V1.0 to V3.0 of the product and offering it at a substantial price for an upgrade, something around $250. Look at the new feature list to see what would justify a $250 upgrade, I do not see this product worth its upgrade price. This is a huge change in quality from Borland's previous focus on the customer. How can they afford to operate this way considering that they are struggling to survive in a very competative marketplace? The strategy they used in the past with respect to providing functionality ahead of their competitors, a well-tested and thought out product, and offering this at a very affordable price to their customer evidently worked well which their past success can attest to. Now when they desparately need to just survive, they have dropped this proven and successful formula from their business operating practices. Does this make any sense? Who is at Borland spending the time to think about the customer? To succeed in this competative business you need to offer more than product functionality that imitates what other companies are providing in the marketplace. Personally, I do not see Borland being around in the future unless they chart new terratory and transform themselves into a company that is focused once again on the customer, and make this happen quickly. From my present experiences, at a time they desparately need to pursue such a strategy, I am seeing no evidence so far of this approach to business in terms of my experience as a user of their products. The biggest mistake the board of directors made was to fire the founder of this company. Despite his attitudes and the self-focus he developed over time, he did still provide the creative leadership and the focus on the customer in terms of offering advanced product features at a good value that worked well. Before such a person in a company is replaced, the board of directors needed to carefully consider the options and be in the position to assure themselves that they can provide the company with this same type of leadership through other individual(s) they can aquire to replace the founder. Unfortunately, they did not do their basic homework and his successors have not in any stretch of the imagination provide the company with these essential qualities. At least this is what I have seen in the past. I wonder what the future holds? This is what happens often to maturing companies. Once the company loses its creative and entrepeneural leadership, the leadership that allowed the company to effectively compete in its marketplace, the company is soon to be found struggling down a long slope to extinction with inept mamagenent focusing on internal company "needs" and political issues, like that country club that was being built as the new company headquarters. Looking back at the consequqnces in removing their founder, I do not now have a problem with him using company funds to bankroll his personal band projects, which is one of the reasons that he was ousted from his own company. The consequences for having removed him from his post cost the company much more than his band CD projects ever did. Now my client, one of the larger international companies based out of Japan, is in the process of deciding what product to make their official development platform in their software development efforts. Right now they are leanming heavily toward Microsoft Visual C++. No great surprise here. Does anyone think my client is the only company that is making this decision in the current marketplace? Borland has continued to make big mistakes in their pursuit of business just to survive. Who is thinking of the customer at Borland? I hope this has improved since the recent regrouping of Borland. But if my past and recent experiences with their products like Borland C++ is any indication, I do not think so. Bob Graham