Few considerations on the current and future Delphi and Borland

Recap of the situation

Delphi 2005 is due out around November this year. Fine. It'll contain, according to several Borlanders, three different personalities to work with. Fine. There'll be Pro, Ent and Architect editions. Not really fine. Why isn't it fine? After all, Delphi is mainly used from professionals and for learning there's Lazarus. That's not really fine for several reasons that I'm going to list:

1. Lazarus and Delphi are different products with different goals and different user base
2. Delphi is light years ahead of Lazarus, for historical reasons and for funding reasons
3. Delphi has a technology allowing new components to be installed/uninstalled seamlessly in the environment. With Lazarus, each time you want to add one or more components to the IDE you've got to recompile it.

These are not the only reasons, but the ones I consider most relevant. There's the lack of a Personal edition for the Delphi product line and that's not a good thing. Some people say that it's just not possible to add a Personal because it would look too much like Professional one.
This is true only till some extent, because I don't think the problem lies on the "personal" side of the product, but on the professional side.

Let me explain.

When I have a look at the Pro feature matrix column, I always feel there's something missing.
Just an example: MIDAS wasn't available to the Pro users. Unfortunately the current feature matrix for D2005 is a bit confusing and I'm unable to say if there's now or not.
ASP.NET controls are not available to Pro users. It just seems like Borland leaves us on the edge of the canyon, always waiting for us to jump. That's not a nice feeling.
That's what makes, in my opinion, impossible for Borland to make a Personal edition.

While the new enhancemets are really most welcome, it's probably missing on Borland side the "feeling" for the small shops and single developers. They dind't probably learn a lesson from "Integrating the Enterprise", did you, Borland?

What really beats me off here is understanding what is so wrong with professional users and,
more importantly, how would you define a professional or an enterprise user.
It's very easy these days to do webservices, for example, with RemObjects. Now, if I make a webservice, am I a professional or an enterprise customer? Standing from Delphi editions point of view, I'm an Enterprise customer :-) but I maybe am just a pro under the "pocket" point of view. I agree that some things are just pointless in "Pro" editions, for example the ECO model.
Another example that perfectly shows the situation: I'm a developer with a LAN at home.
Now, I want to target Interbase Server, I can't. That's because the Pro version comes only with Interbase Desktop. Thus, I can't access - for example - from other computers in my home lan my Interbase server because of that. And if I want to make a test I have to do it on my machine, which inherently leads me to choose Firebird because I can target it freely using the whole potential of my LAN. Why then wonder that Borland revenues come less from Delphi and Delphi-related stuff and more from other things? Another example? Ok.
You have to be a software house to become a Borland Technology Partner. Why is this wrong? Simple: because only BTPs can make a request to be included in the Companion CD shipping with Delphi. Thus, I'll obtain not even a chance to try and let my freeware or shareware stuff be
visible. Since there's no way to get onto the companion CD if you don't have financial resources to do so, then you won't likely upload stuff to CodeCentral unless you're really interested in giving away for free some of your works. That's, imho, probably one of the reasons this is wrong. Plus, you're entitled to leave a message for Borland when you upload something, but you never get a response back. At least, I never received one and I uploaded 4 things. I put always the same message. Is there anyone reading those messages? I strongly doubt it. Not to speak about the "Get Published" section on BDN. If you want to be able to publish, you have to FAX the agreement. LOL that's plain crazy, come on! I live in Italy, faxing to USA is an intercontinental call. That's what has been mainly stopping me from writing anything for BDN, and I would have a few things to say. I'm still using Delphi 6 and I'm plain happy with it. Oh yes, I'd love to be able to play with Kylix shipping with D7, but I can't, because the contability raises an EFinanceException when I press the "Buy" button :-)

Ok, that's all for now.

See ya later!

Andrew