OOPS! Time to get objective about Borland
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The 20th birthday bash of Borland turned out to be a geek's gathering of Bangalore's best. Anand Parthasarathy looks back at the road map of the world's first and best known `software agnostic'.
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WHEN COMPUTER geeks flock together, the sparks fly and the jokes bounce off the wall. The first ever `Borcon' or Borland User's Conference in India, was held in the metropolis of Bangalore last week, marking the 20th birthday of the US-based software company whose products were often called a `developer's dream' because they helped you do whatever programming you needed to do — only faster — without trying to force you into this or that proprietary software embrace.
Founded by Phillipe Kahn in 1983, only two years after the personal computer era began with IBM's PC and Microsoft's Disk Operating System (MS-DOS), Borland's very first product `Turbo Pascal' — an integrated editor-compiler and the industry's first PC development environment — sold for just $ 49.95. It was such a hit, people said Borland was eating Microsoft's lunch.
Ever since, Borland, bar a hiccup or two (it even bizarrely changed its name briefly to `Inprise' in 1998), has always come out with its own developer tool, hard on the heels of every new programming language.
Bjarne Stroustrup created C++ for Bell Labs in 1983; Borland's Turbo C1.0 was released in 1987 and Turbo C++ by 1990. Windows 3.1, the most popular of Microsoft's Windows releases came in 1990. Borland's Turbo C++ for Windows 3.0 followed within a year.
Meanwhile, in 1989, Turbo Pascal 5.5 had brought `Object Oriented Programming for the rest of us' — equipping a generation of programmers with the ability to build in the OOPS factor.
When the e-commerce revolution began in the mid 1990s, Borland was again quick on the uptake, with Delphi, a `design-to-deploy' e-business tool.
In 1997 came J-Builder, a tool that to some extent, anticipated the popularity of Sun's Java environment as an `open' alternative to proprietary software. The company's Linux development system, Kylix came in 2001, a full decade after Finnish student Linus Torvalds created the open system named after him.
This is a long time, long by Borland standards — but talking to many of their engineers at Borcon, last week, I could sense a fair bit of scepticism about how much serious software development Linux would see in the next few years.
On his part, Indian Institute of Information Technology-Bangalore (IIIT-B) Director S. Sadagopan, in his keynote urged Borland to set up a development centre in India. ``We are not just a developing nation; we are a (software) developer's nation'', he said, adding,
``we have `Intel Inside', on PCs; now let's have `India Inside' written on software boxes.''
Bangalore's twenties-something software whiz-kids — some not born when first-generation Indian programmers got their excited hands on first copies of Borland's `Turbo Pascal' ( they came on half a dozen 5 inch floppies) — flocked to the Bangalore Borcon in large numbers.
They came to hear company honchos evangelize about the latest Borland offering, `Janeva6', which allowed programmers to create a `software sangam' where rival products of two computing streams, Java ( J2EE) and Dot Net ( .Net) could co-exist. Borland — known as a `software agnostic' — has distanced itself from such software Star Wars.
Some would say it has been a particularly agile trapeze artiste, carrying both Sun and Microsoft tools on its pole without tilting towards either.
But for how long? Nick Jackson, Borland's Director of Business Development ( Asia-Pacific) told me: ``I can see a day coming when all this `techy maya' will end... when nobody will bother with what runs the system underneath — Java or .Net or whatever.
The programmer will be able to build applications on top which are transparent to the original software's parentage''. Satyen H. Parikh, Borland-India's Managing Director, added that the huge wireless market would kick things in this direction.
The company is strongly supporting all Java flavours and as well as the full suite of .Net's multiple language options in its new application lifecycle management products.
The new Enterprise Studio 7 for Java has just been shipped, even as the company unveiled Delhi 8 for the .Net Framework. That did not prevent Mr Parikh from opening the conference, talk-show-host-style, warming up the audience, with a Microsoft joke that won empathetic guffaws:
Fact One: Bill Gates earns $ 250 a second. That's about $ 21 million a day or $ 7.8 billion a year. If he drops a $ 1000 note he doesn't stop to pick it up, because in the four seconds it takes him to bend down he would have earned that much again."
Fact Two: What if Microsoft had to give away $ 1 every time someone's Windows desktop "hung"? Bill would be a pauper in 3 years".
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