Borland: The Saga Continues

I had a great chat with Borland last week, and discovered that the death of its IDE business "was greatly exaggerated", in a way. So what's really going on at Borland? The press releases didn't make it clear, and the truth of the matter is that it is true, Borland will no longer be associated with the IDEs on which we cut our programming teeth. But the divestiture of its IDEs isn't as bad as it sounds.

Borland has essentially created a new company, referred to currently as "DevCo" until the right name is plucked from the sky, which will continue to develop and enhance all the IDEs you've come to know and love. This new company is looking for investors for this company, and plan - hope - to keep it running independently as it moves forward.

Borland will continue its strategy of focusing on ALM (Application Lifecycle Management), including deeper integration with acquired technologies from StarTeam (source control), Together (modeling a la UML), and Tempo (ITPM: IT Portfolio Management). Borland plans to introduce a holistic platform to solve the enterprise's ALM needs, while "DevCo" will focus on IDE development.

The divestiture gives Borland the opportunity to integrate with a wider variety of IDEs and tools without feeling guilty, and offers "DevCo" this same opportunity. The two will continue to maintain a strategic partnership, just as both maintain a number of partnerships with software development and ALM vendors today.

And for those of you who just can't live without a copy of Turbo C or Turbo Pascal, "DevCo" maintains the rights to all Borland's "Turbo" products, as well as its current line of developer technology, and you can download any of your favorite "Antique" software at the Borland Museum.It isn't well organized, so you'll have to peruse the articles pertaining to the software you want to download in order to find the cleverly hidden download link within the article.

So go on and grab some IDE, you know you want to see how fast Turbo Pascal 1.0 can compile on today's machines!