Request to Buy Delphi Rejected By Board

Posted by Kirby Turner on September 22, 2005

Have you read this?

Robert Coates made an offer to buy Delphi and Deploy (whatever that is) from Borland for $150,000,000. Yep, $150 million from a company valued at $242 million (a difference of $92 million). And Borland’s Board of Directors said “No”.

On top of that, this article includes a number of quotes from Borland’s chief marketing office Rick Jackson, none of which include Delphi, such as “.NET developers who want to make use of Borland Together modeling tools and its CaliberRM requirements offerings do so in Visual Studio, using Borland products designed for Microsoft?s development environment.” So Delphi.NET developers cannot use the Delphi IDE with tools like Together and CaliberRM?

I’ve never really worried about the future of Delphi, but now I’m wondering what Borland is thinking. If Coates is right and members of the Delphi R&D team leave, what does this mean to the future of Delphi? And if Borland is not welling to sell it for what I feel is a more than reasonable price, is it possible that the product life cycle will come to an end within the next few years?

I for one love Delphi. In my opinion, it is the best development language, environment, and platform for Windows-based applications. 3rd party support for the language through components and such is incredible. And while C# is on my list of top 2 favorite languages, I can’t imagine doing Windows development without Delphi. I spent the last 4 years working in C# and I can’t begin to explain how happy I am to be working in Delphi again.

[Thanks to Nick Hodges for pointing out these URLs. And be sure to read these additional comments from Nick’s blog site.]


Posted in uncategorized. Tagged in .