In “That Which We Dare Not Name”, Borland Chief Scientist, Danny Thorpe discussed Borland's internal concern over information disclosed in his blog.

The article was published on 2nd May, and I've actually read it on 2nd May, and I'm filing my response now.

Kylix had been out for 2 years. Since then, there were no updates. What conclusions should or can be drawn? As a developer briefly familiar with Borland, I'm speculating that the reason there were no updates was that Borland had been busy the past 2 years, working on Galileo, (which is the C#Builder IDE, and also the Delphi 8 IDE), C#Builder and Delphi 8. In addition, Borland had also been merging the products acquired (Caliber, Together, StarTeam) some time ago, into the current product line of  X m Builder n (where X is either C, or J, m is one of #, ++, or empty, and n is either empty, or X, and playing these combinations give you JBuilder, C++BuilderX and C#Builder) and Delphi.

What kind of conclusions would non-developers such as clueless project managers draw from the lack of future directions and information? (Why, just last year, I had the opportunity to meet an IT project manager who thought NT ran autoexec.bat when booting up!) Back in my younger days, I was told that when a baby is born, you have to induce it to cry so that it can be proven the baby is not deaf, or mute (hope I remember it correctly. If not, it's my faulty memory). So, if a baby can't cry, it's a problem because, it's either deaf, mute, or both.

Due to the presence of my blog, I have been sought out by companies or peoeple in Singapore looking for Delphi or Kylix developers. This morning, a person from an IT consultancy contacted me about looking for developers in Kylix for development on Linux. Since Borland have not provided any directions or information on Kylix other than the fact that there will be no updates for Kylix this year, I told this person that the last time Kylix was out was two years ago, and that the versions of Linux supported are two years back. I then directed said person to Borland Singapore, so he would be meeting up with Borland people next week.

A lot of developers care about the future, and direction of Borland since Borland's tools, in my opinion, can be considered to be the best development tool for any platform. I care too, after all, I've been using Borland since Sidekick, the TSR.