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

To: Robert Graham who wrote (9293)	3/4/1998 9:08:00 AM
From: Scott Pedigo	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 10836

I've been balking at buying upgrades for some time now. The last BC++ I was satisfied with was for 3.0/3.1. I was angered when they dropped their DOS IDE and screwed all the programmers still developing for DOS, and further angered by their rip-off special offers and upgrades: they would buy some third-party product (such as PharLap), sell it to me with a special offer, then include it essentially for free in the very next product upgrade. The increased frequency of the upgrades and the inflated prices finally convinced me to stop automatically buying every upgrade. I finally bit the bullet when Windows95 came out and switched to developing in Windows. I ported an app to BC++ 4.0, got the project all set up, then was disappointed to have to start all over when the 4.5 upgrade did not provide backward project compatibility. The 5.0 upgrade didn't even start after installation. I don't mean just a few bugs - it would crash on start-up. After installing the patches over the next few months, I got it to work. But by then I'd just given up on using it anyway. Now the the cry is that the focus is on the Enterprise, not the desktop. As if the reason for crappy desktop products is that the better part of the development resources are being invested in a more promising market elsewhere. Hello. I got news for those who buy this line - cause and effect have been conveniently reversed. If Borland hadn't fallen down with the quality of their desktop products, they wouldn't be having to essentially try to find a new line of business. * OFF TOPIC * Having just dumped on Borland, I have to say that I despise MS. I hold MS responsible for the catastrophic state of software quality in general. If their OS wasn't based on a flawed chip technology which they helped design with Intel (segment chaos? 640K DOS barrier?) which has held back software development for over a decade, and resulted in who knows how many man-centuries of investment in quirky work-arounds (QEMM, PharLap, etc.), who knows where we might be today. If their OS wasn't an ever- increasing collection of incomprehensible API's with thousands of system calls, and wasn't based on a flawed foundation (DOS) then maybe I'd be able to buy a program which actually worked right all the time, instead of most of the time. You want to talk QA? Borland should give me free products to try out. I seem to always stumble over problems right away. True life example: ----------------- I couldn't get PAP login with my Internet service provider to work on my main system, a Dell XPS P166 running the original retail Windows95. Acting on a hunch, I went out to the store and bought a new copy of everything (all in German as I live in Zurich): Windows95 retail version MS-Plus Norton Utilities 2.0 Norton Anti-Virus 3.0 Norton Uninstaller Norton CrashGuard Deluxe WordPerfect Office 8.0 CorelDraw 8.0 Internet Accelerator QEMM 97 Quarterdeck CleanSweep PartitionMagic 3.0 DriveImage DriveCopy System Commander 3.0 Norton Utilities 3.0 (yes, after buying 2.0) In a newly formatted partition I installed Windows95 from scratch. Didn't go easily due to my PCI Ethernet controller, and my Creative Labs cards (SoundBlaster PnP 32, 3D Blaster video card) but eventually I got all the drivers installed. Installed Norton Utilities 2.0. Every time I accessed the "Norton Protected Files", my desktop hung and had to be rebooted. So much for the quality there. Fixed that by buying Norton Utilities 3.0 which seems to work OK. Installed the Norton Uninstaller. When I installed some apps like the other Norton programs, Word Perfect Office and Corel Draw for example, it did NOT always detect the end of the installation and therefore could not check for changes to record, nor could it follow the next installation since it was still "following" the previous one. No buttons to manually start/end the damn thing. So much for that capability - unreliable == worthless. Installed Norton CrashGuard Deluxe. Experienced plenty of hangs, and it never prevented a singe one. Worthless, except for the extra program which removes bad registry entries, of which MS left plenty after the installation of Windows. Norton AntiVirus - works fine. But there is a major duplication since Norton Utilities (and even the CrashGuard) also have their own AntiVirus files and capability. Internet Accelerator - works as advertised. QEMM97 - bought this for the MagnaRam, which is supposed to reduce disk access by the Windows caching mechanism, not for the increased DOS memory. Everything seems to work, EXCEPT that when I select the menu item to display MagnaRam statistics, it displays them and then hangs the system. CleanSweep - same problem as Norton Uninstaller. No buttons to manually start/end the monitoring of an installation, and the automatic capability which tries to intercept SETUP.EXE and INSTALL.EXE programs causes more trouble than it is worth. Hung my installation of MS-Plus real good. Also, when attempting to deinstall a program, INCORRECTLY identified a whole bunch of sound files as belonging to it and defaulted to erasing them as well. Lucky me, I was paying attention and overrode it. PartitionMagic - works like a champ. I used the same company's DriveImage product to make my own manual "uninstaller". I make an image of my entire drive after each major installation, so that I can REALLY go back if the installation screws up everything. SOFTWARE QUALITY IS A JOKE. I bought a brand-new copy of the newest versions of the leading operating system and utilities by the leading vendors, installed on a clean system, and more than half does not fulfill the intended function at all. Microsoft, Symantec, and Quarterdeck can all kiss my you-know-what in that order.