CodeGear has a new CEO. But why? There’s the usual bland stuff in the press release:
Today we made a change to the leadership team at CodeGear. Jim Douglas is joining as CEO of CodeGear. Jim will be responsible for driving CodeGear to the next level, building on the solid foundation and momentum achieved by the CodeGear team under Ben Smith’s leadership.
Departing CEO Ben Smith has a blog entry that is no more revealing.
Judging by comments on the Borland newgroups, developers are fearing the worst. The problem: a change of CEO is a sign of instability, when CodeGear customers need reassurance that their preferred tools are in good hands. I didn’t see any previous suggestion that Smith’s appointment was intended to be short-term.
To make matters worse, there are signs that both Delphi for PHP (see here) and Delphi 2007 (see here) were released too quickly – especially Delphi for PHP. Strategically unwise.
There’s still nothing to touch Delphi for native Windows (if you don’t need 64-bit). And tackling PHP tools is a great idea. But in a difficult market the company cannot afford many slip-ups.
Well changing the company name all the time doesnt help either Borland->Inprise->Borland->Codegear (!)
I know the new name reflects the split off of the IDE dev tool part but yes they must be losing significant market share now to M$ and .net.
I still use D7 as per Tim’s comment as speed of development is great, the UI controls *still* surpass what is available in .net 2.0 – try dropping a page control on a winform and then hiding the tabs – you can’t! (not without a fudge) unlike Delphi’s tabvisible=True/False and thats one example of many. I also like the fact I can still write decent apps under 2 meg in size with no runtimes!
Gary