Comments on: Borland's squeeze play

New CEO Scott Arnold tries to navigate the company between industry heavyweights and an assault from open-source products.

The team of software development

I believe Scott has articulated a greater social conumdrumm that extends beyond the wall of the software team. Essentially it is important that we as individuals understand our role in a greater process. It is through this understanding that we begin to realize that our own pursuit of higher productivity may in places create a destructive force against those who are working with us to create a product. Therefore the cutlure of hero-devloper must be understood as a non-sustainable and ultimatley destructive way of deliverying solutions. The developer must instead focus his creative energy and output in ways that not overly restrict or cause other particpants to expend more resources and energy than required to reach the goal. The developer is a member of the team and should act accordingly.

It would be intersting to model a software culture based in part by Ivan Illach work Tools for Conviviality.

[System Tyrant]

More than developers.

Your comment hits upon a problem that effects all business. Team work is something all business with more than one person needs to understand. The problem is getting people to understand and keeping them team players once they do. People tend to believe that their job is always harder than anyone elses.

Its a dessert topping and a floor wax ...

Borland's been too many things with too many visions by too many CEO's. Can it fit between MSFT and IBM? Can it do IDE up through process management suites? Can it do open source as well as proprietary? Well Arnolds right to to focus on tough, high valued areas - but will he get Borland there?

This interview reminds me of one of the news.com.com perspective pieces this summer - "Misplaced Software Priorities", which talked about focus and determination in open source as a transformative process for clear execution - something Borland's lacked.

[Richie]

I say

Keep up the good work don't let people get to you I have faith in a company that has been around for so many years. Stick with it Borland.

[zaznet]

Unique Opportunity

Borland has a unique opportunity to fill the gaps where Microsoft and IBM won't go. They also have a better position to draw on the open source community and developers. The hard part there is drawing money out of those developers.

There are a lot of development languages, and as products tie different platforms together someone needs to be there to make that job easier.

I could see a multi-platform IDE for a large list of development languages with integrated support for a CVS repository.

Delphi users: who needs .NET?

"With our Delphi installed base, we have a huge chunk of Win32 developers we're helping to move ahead on .Net".

It looks Borland does not understand at all that many Delphi developers don't need to move and don't want to move to .NET as long as Windows allows for native code to run. If I needed a WM or a GC I wuold been using VB6 or Java already.

And whenever I move to .NET - if forced - I will be using MS tools, of course. Why should I use someone's else just to do the same thing? That's why MS likes Borland so much... move everybody to .NET and they will rule...