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The Start of the End for Borland?

7 May 2007

by Huw Collingbourne

People have been saying that Borland is "on the way out" for almost as long as I can recall - in fact, in spite of some notable ups and downs, the company has proven, time and again, to be one of the great survivors in the software industry, so I wouldn’t wager on their immediate demise...

All the same, I have to say that there are some comments that seem to me depressingly close to the truth in this rather cataclysmic appraisal of Borland/CodeGear over on TechRepublic.

You know the whole rubbernecking thing, where people slow down near an accident so they can take a moment to look at the carnage? I kinda feel like I’m rubbernecking whenever I read about the slow decline of Borland... Because everything that company has done lately seems to be a wreck, and like a spectacular car crash, I cannot turn away. I can only look and wonder how on earth the accident happened.

Personally, I’m still rooting for CodeGear. I have no views one way or the other about the ’parent’ company, Borland. I don’t even understand what they do for a living (ALM? Means nothing to me...). But I would like the developer chaps at the not-entirely-spun-off ’spin-off’ company, CodeGear, to succeed. Now that Microsoft tools are targeting .NET before all else, CodeGear’s most famous product, Delphi (that’s ’Delphi For Delphi’ I mean, just in case you are confused), is clearly, in my view, the best visual development tool for Win32.