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发信人: Bob (Dinosaur), 信区: CompExpress
标题: Borland still makes the best PC development tools
发信站: BBS 水木清华站 (Sat May 2 06:28:27 1998)

Scott Erickson
Friday May 01, 1998
Occupation: SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Location: FARGO, ND
Computer: PENTIUM/586
Favorite Topic: DEVELOPMENT TOOLS AND ISSUES

As a long-time Borland Pascal/Delphi user, I'd like to start by saying
that in spite of any bad management as a company, Borland still makes
the best PC development tools - yes, better than almighty Microsoft's
tools.

Has Borland made some bad moves? You bet they have - they managed to
lose their clear lead in the PC database (dBase and Paradox) and
spreadsheet (Quattro Pro) markets. As usual, a superior product was
nearly obliterated by having to compete with Microsoft - Quattro Pro
was the first spreadsheet to use the innovative tabbed notebook
metaphor, but Excel added it a year or two later and now it's the king
of PC spreadsheets; dBase was THE preeminent PC database tool with a
gigantic customer and developer base and probably thousands of
dBase-based applications, but Access came out and destroyed it in
spite of a lack of product maturity compared to dBase. While part of
this downfall (along with others in the industry - like WordPerfect
vs. Word, Windows vs. OS/2) can be attributed to the pervasiveness of
Microsoft's brand name and its ability to undercut the competition's
pricing, there's got to be some blame taken by Borland. After all,
Intuit has remained the leader in personal and small-business finance
packages in spite of Microsoft's best efforts (Money and Profit,
respectively).

Does the name change to Inprise improve my opinion of Borland? No.
While it doesn't damage my opinion of them, it makes me wonder what
they hope to accomplish. The name itself doesn't really convey any
images to me as far as what the company is or represents (does it have
some intrinsic or implied meaning I'm missing?) - at least when
Btrieve Technologies changed it's name to Pervasive Software (which I
thought was dumb at the time because of the well-known and respected
Btrieve product name), at least the word Pervasive meant something to
me. What does Inprise mean, anyway?

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