It has been two weeks since the new CodeGear company was announced. If little has happened to their web site, some more thoughts have surfaced, including those from Allen Bauer. He says: "We had been diligently preparing for one specific outcome and something slightly different happened" and later concludes: "So were the last 9 months a waste? Absolutely not! As a matter of fact, we're in far better of a position to be successful and run this business", explaining why the sale effort helped the company to better understand its own market and customers.
Autonomy and ALM
In the same blog post, Allen says "CodeGear will be allowed to operate in near total autonomy". This is the mantra begin repeated these days. To underline this was already true under Borland DTG, Nick Hodges shows how many open source ALM tools are integrated with JBuilder: Subversion, xPlanner, Bugzilla, and Continuum. This is a clear departure from the all-in-house-ALM appraoch of past versions driven by Borland. In particular, I hope to see at least Subversion and Bugzilla nicely integrated in future versions of Delphi.
The only problem is that this runs contrary to the official excuse for the missed sale, you find again in this (interesting) ADT article:
"It became very difficult to present the developer tools group as a separate entity. These were two completely intertwined companies--facilities, employees, administration".
Now facilities are mostly separate (only Borland DTG works out of the historical Scotts Valley offices, if I'm not wrong), although this is not true for international offices, employees were split last May, and software products "have very different business models and target audiences". The only tie-in is the ALM side of Borland Developer Studio. Hopefully they will untie this knot at the soonest.
Another problem might have beeb caused by the management of IP rights and patents, but (in my ignorance) I think a solution could be found. Was it mainly a price problems? Understandable, simply let us know. I really hope Borland (and not CodeGear, it is not their fault) will tell us more honestly what happened, to avoid any speculation.
DavidI and Bauer (again)
The ADT article underlines also another interesting point:
"Several of the company's star employees will be staying on, including David Intersimone, Borland's VP of developer relations and chief evangelist."
It goes on citing a Gartner analyst saying:
"The fact that David Intersimone is still around is a very good thing. He's the touchstone for a lot of customers."
Well put. DaviI has been the public face of Borland for many years, much more than any of the many short-time CEOs! Of course, there are many other long-time developers, product managers, and evangelists at the company, but no one has such a public image and worlwide recognition. As he states in his own blog post commenting the article, DavidI has been with the company 21.5 years. Wow!
Finally, there was another great post by Allen Bauer on why a niche company should not target its own (bigger) competitors, with more marketing muscles, but serve its own customers at the best. This might mean, CodeGear should try to avoid competing feature by feature with Visual Studio, but keep an eye open to what customers need. Better Win32 applications, integration with open source tools (the circle is closing!), support of open plaftorms (PHP, Python , AJAX are not owned by a specific company, unlike Win32, .NET, and even Java until recently), looking for real customer needs rather than marketing fads: each of these points can make a difference.
Go CodeGear. We are all very impatient now, as the future really looks brigher than in the last couple of years.