Nice to see such refreshing honesty:
You heard it here first: Robert Scoble was wrong.
In 1995 I said Borland would die.
I was wrong.
I had just seen Phillipe Kahn introduce Delphi. He seemed drunk to me and obnoxious. A sore loser, after all, Microsoft had kicked his ass. And he attacked Visual Basic, which was the language that gave me 10 years of pay checks (I was an editor with Fawcette Technical Publications BasicPro Magazine which then became Visual Basic Programmer's Journal).
But, as someone who was a Borland developer for 9+ years, I'm not at all certain I'd go back. Don't get me wrong -- Delphi is awesome but Borland burned a lot of people. I'd say their key marketing challenge is restablishing trust. Before I buy a tool these days -- for anything -- I know that the cost of the tool is the smallest part of the equation. The real cost is in using the tool; learning it and then being orphaned by the vendor and having to move on. So as much as I agree with Scoble that Borland does a good job, choosing tools is something that we do more wisely now than in the old days. Thinking ahead to the future is much more common now than it once was. So before Borland could lure me back, they have to make me trust them and that's awfully hard.
Here's one thing that could do it: Delphi for OSX support. For professional development tools, it's always been "do something else" when it came to the Mac. Visual Basic? Nope. Visual C++? Not really. Turbo Pascal or Delphi? Not a chance. But if Borland brought out Delphi for OSX then it sends a very real, "we're serious" message. This would give one tool that could let you build GUI apps across three different platforms. Now that would be awesome.
