>> Borland's marketing may be wide of the mark, but as long as their >> technical teams deliver the goods, I'll be a customer. > > Yes, but they failed to deliver a working product in Delphi 2005, at least > initially, and the function upgrades I expect to pay money for (such as > 64-bit support) are simply no there. Missing. Perhaps your needs are > different, but Delphi 5 Professional continues to satisfy my requirements, > so much as I might like to push some money Borland's way, I can see little > or no justification for doing so at the moment. > > Perhaps with Delphi-11? > Perhaps when they stop asking for money-for-nothing on an annual basis?
After using Visual Studio for the last several months, I finally owned up to the fact that MS did or will do a lot of the things Borland should have done for the little guy. Free light database (MSDB/SQL Express) that can be shipped with the application and is tightly integrated into the development environment, an inexpensive targeted version that isn't a trial or academic version, tons of great tutorials on their website and sponsoring books both online and print. The did goof a few things along the way, but so far I have to give them an A for their rollout of VS.net. I love Delphi as a language and our core product is written in it so I am not going anywhere any time soon, but Borland really missed the boat several years ago when they had a fighting chance. Had they fixed case sensitivity in Interbase and given it away, integrated InterBase development into Delphi, created an actual good lightweight middletier that shipped with Delphi (buying ASTA or one of the other good middle tiers would have gone a long way), went with integrated handheld development instead of Kylix, dumped the BDE and created the lighter dbExpress sooner, spent more time on speeding up/stabilizing the IDE rather than bloating it with features 90% of the Delphi developers don't use and most importantly remember that grassroots little guys build the corporate world. Sponsor those books and external websites which feed developers into the pool... create a real inexpensive or free small business/solo version... they could have been a contenda'... all academic now I suppose. Borland somewhere along the line thought maximizing the corporate world profits were more important than building support in what was and still is to some degree a thriving online community. What could have been we would never know... I do know it was an uphill battle all the way, but think how much better VS.net would be if Delphi was that much better. __________________________________________________ Delphi-Talk mailing list -> [email protected] http://www.elists.org/mailman/listinfo/delphi-talk
