Saturday, April 05, 2003

Borland Gets Theirs I used to like Borland stuff. I spent a long time building apps with Delphi and a good deal of time with JBuilder as well. The technology was always pretty good -- not always perfect, but pretty good. Nothing has ever touched Delphi for sheer speed and usability in a development environment. JBuilder was pretty damn good, too. The thing that always bothered me about Borland was their increasingly nasty and aggressive upgrade cycle. Once upon a time you could buy a Borland product for $300. Every two years they'd release something new and it was generally worth the $150 or so you'd have to pay to get it. They also released regular patches and upgrades for their products. The last year or two you've had to pay way more than that. It's effectively shut the hobbyists out of the market, and I think that's sad. Borland used to generate a lot of business there. Now they're just interested in selling you on their very short upgrade cycle. You get almost no benefit from having owned their products before. It's "pay up" time. And patches are practically a thing of the past. Significant problems with their products usually are just left hanging, and as a user you're expected to buy the latest release to get fixes you should have had in the first place. That's why I'm so pleased with Eclipse, and so happy that I have a choice. Let's see how their upgrade cycles and expenses do in the face of serious, free competition. You're not going to find a lot of developers cheering Borland on -- they've been screwed by the pricing and upgrade policies too many times. Borland will have to rethink its pricing model. They can tackle this from a product lock-in standpoint, keeping developers who use the other, licensable technologies that ship with JBuilder, but that's going to be a stretch. Most of what's shipped with JBuilder comes in other forms, from other organizations, and is often free. So what is JBuilder really about? IntelliJ is better for refactoring. Eclipse is better for speed, and has massive support (plus is better for refactoring too). Enterprise-level development can benefit from JBuilder, but there are some pretty good libraries out there that will make a serious dent. I need to make a call to my Together/J representative to find out how my maintenance terms are going to change. Will this be the end of TJ as my modelling tool of choice? I hope not -- I hope they are not going to charge me a 75% "maintenance" fee on a $6000 product. I have been paying around 18% (I think) which I consider quite reasonable. All development on TJ seems to have stopped -- I haven't seen anything new from them in a really long time. It all adds up to a restructing and implosion, in my opinion. Still, for the sake of the brilliance of TJ, I hope they can do something with at least that product. I won't be coming back to JBuilder, even if they couple TJ to it. I won't use JBuilder just to get at the capabilities in TJ. I have my good ole TJ license still working for me, and I'll continue to use that one for my basic modelling, even if it doesn't work with later versions of Java. 1:04:13 AM