joeware - never stop exploring... :)

In the wee hours of this morning (EST anyway) Borland announced that they are going to start looking for a buyer or investor to take on their IDE and Compiler products and people. This of course had the blogs and Borland newsgroups hopping this morning with everyone guessing what the future will bring. Lots of naysayers thinking the world is ending but that doesn’t seem to vary much from their normal message. Speculation on WHO is going to buy out the group, will it be Google? Will it be Microsoft?

What do I think? Does it matter? Not much except to me. But I think this is a good thing. I have been a registered Borland customer since Borland Turbo Assembler and Turbo C back in the 80’s. Unfortunately I have seen a lot of confusion and misteps out of Borland the last 5 or so years. I think a lot of that is due to priorities within the company and the fact that this group no longer the cash cow for the company. I firmly believe there are folks in that company that still live and breath the compilers and this is great news for them so they can get fresh backing and power and get to do what they really want to do.

I wouldn’t mind Microsoft or Google buying up this group. I would love to see the Visual Studio product get the Win32 programming capabilities that Borland has had for 10 years. I think Microsoft is making a rather large mistake with trying to shove .NET down everyone’s throat. I think there will be in for some surprises when they jump whole hog into writing with the framework and then hit MS Platforms that don’t support the framework. I think however if Google and Microsoft is going after it, they will smack MS around and take it. Google has been very effective at getting what they want recently. Plus they have already raided Borland for folks from the compiler group in the last year which could bode well for those making the decision on where to go.

Here are some articles on the topic

http://www.borland.com/us/company/news/press_releases/2006/02_08_06_borland_acquires_segue_software.html

http://community.borland.com/article/0,1410,33439,00.html

joe