As you may have heard, I will be leaving Borland by the end of the month to take a job at Microsoft. This has not been an easy decision to make, but I have now been with Borland for 13 years, and I feel that it is time for me to try some new challenges. For those of you worried about Delphi's future, I want to assure you that the product is in the hands of an incredibly competent team of people for whom I harbor the deepest respect. Back in the old Turbo Pascal days it was possible for one person to write and maintain an entire product. This is no longer the case. Delphi was built by a team, and I have full confidence in the team's ability to develop and deliver new versions of Delphi. In fact, the Delphi team at this point is almost twice the size it was when we shipped 1.0 in early '95. And Delphi97 is going to be a great product which solves a number of the problems you've been asking us about, such as multi-tier database access and COM/ActiveX support. When you build a product like Turbo Pascal or Delphi, it is incredibly rewarding to see the enthusiasm of developers and the great applications it's been used to create. I can't tell you how much I appreciate all of the support you've given over the years. Anders
From: Lance Devin (Borland) 75674,1251 We have the brightest people in the industry. One of the reasons to moving to a C++ backend was to create less reliance on Anders in critical areas like this. While Anders will surely be missed for his intelligence, architectural insights, companionship, and leadership, we have many other guys that have already stepped up to the plate to make Delphi 97 the best product in the market. We in Borland have the resources and the technology to put the customer at the center of our business and to meet your needs. While your concerns are warranted, we have known about this for quite some time and it does not affect the way we focus or produce product. Lance
From: Zack Urlocker (Borland) 76217,1053 As Lance has indicated, we're cautious about pre-announcing our products, but we do have quite a few interesting products under development. We'll start showing a bit more of these this month and next at Software Development East as well as at Comdex. I think folks will be pleased to see the improvements that we'll be making available. In fact, you'll see that Delphi fits into a whole family of interoperable development tools that includes client/server and Internet development. Strictly from a point of view of how much innovation there is in the box, I think Delph97 is actually more innovative than Delphi 1.0 or 2.0 by tackling some pretty tough problems for all developers. --Zack
From: Charlie Calvert 76711,533 Delphi 97 is in great shape. It will ship on time and will be by far the best Delphi tool to hit the market yet. The new COM and distributed Application support will make this version more than a worthy succsor to previous versions of Delphi. There is simply no reason for concern here. Delphi 97 will be an outstanding tool. More than a match for its competition. Borland itself has a much stronger future than you suggest. For one thing, we have plenty of cash. The company is in very strong shape financially. Furthermore we have greate Delphi, C++ and Java products in the pipeline, with all of them scheduled to ship in the next few months. I don't mean to paint too rosy a picture here. Obviously losing Anders is a bad break, and clearly we are looking forward to the day when our new products will increase our revenue stream. Nevertheless, Delphi is the best tool of its kind in the field today, and it will remain so for the forseeable future. With strong C++ and Java products coming out in the future, there is reason for even the most pragmatic people to keep an eye on Borland. Sure these are tough times, but there are lots of reasons to look forward to a good future for Borland and its outstanding technology. - Charlie
From: Zack Urlocker (Borland) 76217,1053 As many of you have read, yes, Anders is leaving next month and he'll be going to Microsoft. We're certainly sad to see Anders leave. But it was a personal decision on his front. After being here 13 years, he's decided to try something different. The architectural work that Anders covers is complete for Delphi 97 and we're in beta. Anders departure won't affect the ship date or features going forward. Chuck Jazdzewski, who some of you probably know, will be moving up from co-architect on Delphi to taking over the full architectural duties. Chuck has been here longer than I have and worked closely with Anders for many years especially on VCL, the UI builder etc. He's also played an important role on Java and other products here. So again, even though we'll miss I think the Delphi team is in very good shape to ship a very impressive release. There is a whole crew of folks working on Delphi 97 many of whom have been involved since the very beginning of the project and have a strong vision for where we are taking it in this next release and beyond. (In fact, I've been pleased to see some new features being worked on that I have been asking for for about 3 years now!) The other thing worth noting is that even though we've had our weaknesses from a sales point of view, particularly in the US, we don't have a problem with products and technology. In fact, beginning with IntraBuilder last month, we've got the strongest product pipeline we've had in 6 years with IntraBuilder C/S, new versions of Delphi and C++ and Latte coming that will make folks take another look at Borland, just like when we shipped Delphi 1.0. In addition, with the acquisition of Open Environment completing in November that will enable us to add a higher degree of scalability to our development tools so that they can be used in applications with tens of thousands of users. That's an important part of our overall "golden gate" strategy to bridge between the client server architecture and the Internet architecture for corporate customers. Fixing the sales situation is not trivial and it won't happen over night, but its a heckuva lot easier than if we had the opposite situation and had no new products coming. Then I'd be worried. Whitney Lynn who has joined the company as interim and acting CEO and President is a very smart guy and is going to be spending a lot of his time focused on rebuilding the sales organization so that we can be profitable. That, coupled with the new products is what will get the company turned around. You'll begin to see more positive news in the coming weeks and we'll be showing some of the technologies in the fall at SD East in washington as well as Comdex in vegas. --Zack Urlocker Director of product management
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