CodeGear is Here
So we are finally at it. Aftter the announcement of the sale of the IDE division of Borland, last February, the company ended up with a different decision, spawning off an independent company called CodeGear. The missed sales has been interpreted in many ways, maybe Borland asked too much money, maybe the buyer offered too little (for the real value of the business); there were certainly interested parties. Is this good or bad? Neither, as it seems to me that the sale has only been delayed until a later time. Selling an independent profitable company, with new products, is probably easier than selling a a division of an existing company stuck with great but "old-fashioned" products.
There are many relevant elements in the recent announcement. First, CodeGear will be independent, with its own CEO, management team, marketing group, web support people, separate accounting, and of course great R&D, Q&A, product management and developer relation teams. Exactly those we've worked with in the past, but now with much more control over the company. Even compared to the past few months of DevCo, in which the separate division had to ask for marketing dollars and was bound to the Borland web site management, this is a significant improvement.
CodeGear is Delphi + JBuilder + More
If the birth of CodeGear was much less linear than it could have been, now it is here and this fact is very important for all Delphi developers, but also for developers who've picked other tools and technologies. The goal of the company, in fact, is twofold. On one side, they'll push the existing product line, with Delphi for Win32 and .NET, the new JBuilder on the Eclipse platform, and InterBase. On the other side, they've officially announced their intention to create new development tools for the JavaScript/AJAX world and for web scripting languages. Having separate accounting and budget, they'll probably be able to reserve enough money for all of this, as the "cash cow" attitude of Borland ALM is now certainly gone. [And, please, spare me the "they already forgot about Delphi" mantra: CodeGear would be foolish to try to live on Delphi alone!]
Over the last few months I've seen a number of positive changes, including hiring (or re-hiring) great developers, a new Delphi product manager who is able to work with the community, the Turbo Delphi Explorer and similar free tools, many updates and fixes for the last version of Delphi (BDS 2006), new documentation and communication services inclduing video lessons, the willingness to update the Delphi roadmap... The fact that DevCo did all of this in 6 months while still under the Borland umbrella is certainly a very good sign for the future of a brand new company that... started over 20 years ago with a product called TurboPascal. We have lost that company for too many years, now the CodeGear barbarians are back!
Welcome, we Are Here
For all of these reasons, I really wish the to give a warm and friendly welcome to CodeGear and share my enthusiasm for a formal business operation, which could really open new spaces and unveil scenarios that we could not even imagine one year ago. This is good news for Delphi developers, their tool will receive more care and will be able to participate in larger scenarios, like providing a great data processing backend to those AJAX applications. Delphi developers will again be part of a larger multi-language developers community. This cannot be but positive. And all the developers out there looking for independence from operating system/database/harware vendors should keep an eye on what CodeGear does today and will do in the future.
Personally, even if I also delve in other territories, I'll keep working with Delphi, writing about it, train, and consult on it. I do already look in other directions (JavaScript, web scripting, XML-lingos, and the like) as well, and hopefully those directions will match the new directions CodeGear will take... making me not only a Delphi developer, but a complete CodeGear developer.
Good luck CodeGear and long live Delphi.