My day at EclipseCon..
So I found my way into Santa Clara today. I don’t go there much anymore. I used to go all the time when I worked with Intel as a client and my office for A.T. Kearney was there. It is not exactly the most fun part of Silicon Valley.
But today at EclipseCon, I got to watch Ravi, Joe McGlynn, Anders, David I, and Irene all meeting with developers and talking about what we are doing at CodeGear. While a lot of the focus was on JBuilder 2007 and what we are doing with things like Mylar, etc., it was also just talking to developers about their history with what is now CodeGear. Now this is not always and easy conversation. We have not always been the place where developers matter. We are now.
One of the more interesting announcements of the day was Oracle’s decision to begin supporting Eclipse–well actually the Red Hat efforts on tools was pretty interesting as well…but the Oracle announcement has to have the NetBeans guys over at Sun really thinking about Sun really delivering on its commitment to open source by working with Eclipse. I am sure they have good reasons for not doing it and frankly NetBeans is probably a pretty good product, but if Oracle is moving that way–Sun has to really think about NetBeans. One thing I came away from was we have to do something to make sure our efforts with Eclipse get into the hands of more developers. I just can’t see why anyone who is committed to Eclipse and developing on Java should not be using JBuilder 2007 so we need to remove barriers to this happening.
I am looking forward to continuing the conversation next week at CodeRage. As we head towards 1000 people who are signing up to attend CodeRage it is looking like it’s going to be an interesting dialogue about development, developers and great development tools.
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Posted by Ben Smith on March 7th, 2007 under Uncategorized |
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March 7th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Mr. Smith,
This is the first time I am posting to your blog. I appreciate the fact that you are sharing your opinion with the community. As such, let me share with you my opinion. I think the JBuilder product line will go nowhere. It will become a waste of resources for CodeGear to spend time developing a product that will have no or limited revenue potential. This is based on the fact that Sun has given away the NetBeans IDE. They don’t intent to make money out of it and as such I don’t see how CodeGear can make money out of JBuilder. You can’t build intellectual property on a technology that is developed by a competitor not to mention the fact that it is open sourced. So where is CodeGear’s advantage with JBuilder? What Sun can make money on is providing services around the Java technology such as providing the hardware, OS and custom integration services. Your resources allocated to JBuilder can be better used if it was allocated to the Delphi product line. From there expand and grow it outward like what you are doing with the introduction of Delphi for PHP. Being able to create web applications as simple as creating Win32 applications as Delphi once pioneered is a wide open race right now. Why not focus your resources on that?
IDL
March 7th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
We love what we have done with Jbuilder and see enormous opportunities taking this forward. Our Jbuilder 2007 effort along with future work is already having a huge impact on developers. Java developers matter and as the leading indepedent company where developers matter, we will continue to innovate solutions for Java developers.
I will let Swindell and others talk about the details, but we are delivering alot of value to Java developers. Not only will we look at ways to further innovate, we will look at ways of getting this innovation in the hands of more developers.
March 7th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
I agree with IDL.
The opportunity for Codegear RIGHT NOW is with Win32. Almost all the other development tools players that matter have moved on to .net. The problem is that the developers who are developing for the largest OS platform have not made the mass migration to .net as many would have you think. Fat Clients in good ol’ Win32 are still being developed by the majority of developers.
Concentrate on extending the VCL to every corner of the universe. It is what made Delphi/BCB for Win32 the king of the heap for so long. It’s what will make Delphi for PHP a roaring success. It even made Delphi .net palatable.
With that said, the extensive resources CodeGear expends on JBuilder would be better spent on Delphi for Win32, Delphi for PHP (and Ruby?) and C++ (or whatever it will be called now). Borland was playing against a stacked deck. Sun has the language and IBM is, well, IBM. Let them fight over the Java scraps. CodeGear should go where the money still is - Win32. Even Bill Gates said that Win32 would outlive him.
The Java battles are over and Borland lost the war. Quit wasting money and move on.
March 7th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
I agree with IDL.
The opportunity for Codegear RIGHT NOW is with Win32. Almost all the other development tools players that matter have moved on to .net. The problem is that the developers who are developing for the largest OS platform have not made the mass migration to .net as many would have you think. Fat Clients in good ol’ Win32 are still being developed by the majority of developers.
Concentrate on extending the VCL to every corner of the universe. It is what made Delphi/BCB for Win32 the king of the heap for so long. It’s what will make Delphi for PHP a roaring success. It even made Delphi .net palatable.
With that said, the extensive resources CodeGear expends on JBuilder would be better spent on Delphi for Win32, Delphi for PHP (and Ruby?) and C++ (or whatever it will be called now). Borland was playing against a stacked deck. Sun has the language and IBM is, well, IBM. Let them fight over the Java scraps. CodeGear should go where the money still is - Win32. Even Bill Gates said that Win32 would outlive him.
The Java battles are over and Borland lost the war. Quit wasting money and move on.
March 7th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
While I really appreciate the feedback, we are committed to JBuilder and the Eclipse world and that committment is going to grow as we grow the company and the talent we have.
I am not going to get into who won what, but a move to an Open world creates alot of innovation opportunities for Codegear. The discussion reminds me of discussions I had in the PC business and the disk drive business in the 90’s about who had won and what games are over. Dell and EMC created some industry changes, IBM exited storage, HP game back in PC’s….I can even remember someone telling me AMD should get out of the MP business.
We are making some hard choices at Codegear as we play to win, we believe in developers from C++ to Win32 to PHP and even those who are being "served" by Netbeans. We are a developer companies where developers matter, and we are going to be focusing our resources on developers who matter. So just like you see us bringing the Delphi magic to PHP, you are going to see us bring magic back to the Java world.
Again- we don’t take the feedback lightly–but without getting into the specifics, we like what we see with the developer response to our recent jBuilder release. I loved the passion I saw again today at EclipseCon.
March 8th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Look, I’m trying to use Netbeans with Hibernate to build a Visual Web Application, I’ve been bitching for a couple of weeks already with little and poor success, even the examples in the tutorials are barely reproduceable when you start changing something, for example the includad JavaDB for a real DB2 or MS SQL database.
The learning curve is DAMN steep and most problems are configuration or deployment ones.
My case is not such a valid example because here in the 3rd world salaries are low and no boss will buy expensive dev tools, but I guess whenever the productivity gains are a fraction of a developer’s income, well, it’s a no-brainer.
Pack it with an extensive help system, lots of examples and simple configuration, and you are done.