September 29, 2006, 10:50 am
Borland is abandoning its two-year-old strategy of delivering a “software development platform” to further the goal of “software delivery optimization.” As I feared from the start, Borland’s over-stuffed product portfolio and large ambitions clashed with their limited resources.
To summarize: Borland was once the most loved brand in the programming world. They squandered that in order to become second-tier players in various other niches: first they were a second-tier Oracle, then they were a second-tier Weblogic, and most recently they attempted to become a second-tier Rational. As part of that strategy, they decided that what would be brilliant would be to jettison the pesky remnants of the only things they ever did well, which were IDEs and compilers.
I can’t wait to hear what they’re going to do next. My guess is some sort of second-tier MySpace for Software Development.
September 29, 2006, 10:22 am
Microsoft has granted two additional “grand prizes” to other “Made in Express” finalists. As you may recall, I declared “shenanigans” at the original winner, which was a team project that had been in development for years. An uproar slowly developed and after some reluctance (including a letter from MS Legal, which naturally communicated “We admit no error. If you sue us, we will crush you.”) Microsoft has shelled out another couple $10K prizes, which is certainly the best outcome.
There but for the grace of God go I. Contests that evaluate software with unpaid judges always involve some amount of shenanigans. There is an incredible disparity between the amount of time given to judging a product that took hundreds…thousands…tens of thousands of hours to develop. With the Jolt Awards, we once gave a Jolt to a Visual Studio release that was still in beta on December 31 and gave a “Hall of Fame” award to a product that had never won previously. A declaration of shenanigans would have been just. A long-standing joke we used to make getting off the stage was “No one stood up and cried ‘how dare you?’ Another success!”
So I’m certainly a stone-throwing glass-house-owner. At the Jolts, Rosalyn Lum’s work over the past several years has vastly improved the process and kept shenanigans to a minimum. I still hate certain aspects of the process (particularly, that companies have to pay an entrance fee to be considered) and every year there are finalists and winners that make me want to tear my hair out, but I think, on balance, the benefits of contests that strive to objectively evaluate software development efforts and publicly acknowledge and reward excellent programmers outweighthe shenanigans.
Put away your brooms.
