After 20+ years on Microsoft operating systems, I’m finally considering moving over to the dark side (or *away* from the dark side, depending on who you ask, LOL!). Yes, I’m considering buying a Mac. Actually a MacBook.

I decided to get a Dell 1405 because of it’s purported great battery life and I placed my order Friday night (and I got a 25% coupon, sweet!). Then two things happened on the same day; Dell held my order waiting for me to call to verify it, and I got a MacMall catalog in the mail and decided to read it. Hmmm.

I blogged about the Mac when I first heard of Parallels, and a friend of mine has a MacBook Pro that he runs Windows on so I’ve been considering it for a while. Well, yesterday I went to the store to check it out and it was pretty nice (except for lack of a right mouse button, doh!) but the guy at CompUSA couldn’t tell me about battery life.

No problem, I have another friend with a MacBook and I emailed him to ask about battery life. To which he replied:

I just googled for “mac book pro extended battery” and it
returned plenty of results…

Ouch, Busted! He did go on to relay his experiences, but point taken. :)

Anyway, though I still haven’t decided which laptop to get, I christen thee a new meme in my friends honor while I pay homage to that soon-to-be bygone era where a few people actually did read the manual:

GTFK: Google The F***in’ Keywords

Just to be explicit, there is a proper context for using GTFK. When someone asks you a question that requires a long explanation that they could have easily answered themselves, it is perfectly appropriate to simple tell them:

GTFK!

From this I’m sure they will get the message. ;-)

P.S. I know I don’t have to tell you what the *** stands for.

apple, dell, google, mac, macbook, memes, sociology

I just read the news today that Borland is going to sell it’s IDE Tools Business that includes Delphi, C++ Builder, C# Builder, JBuilder, Kylix and InterBase. Not more than 100 days on the job Tod Nielsen I shaking this up at Borland, just like I expected!  As I’m a big advocate for "burning bridges" so-to-speak (see the eWeek article for the reference) I think this is exactly what Borland needs.  Further, this is a possibility it will really be good for Delphi and other Borland tools faithful.

But the news leaves an interesting question: Who will buy, and what will be the fallout?  The question interesteds me enough I decided to document me thoughts on the matter below:

• Oracle: Uncle Larry’s been on a buying spree lately; maybe he’ll pick up these Borland cast-offs too?  Though Oracle has development tools they don’t have quite the devoted following that Borland’s tools have.  Buying them would give Oracle some world class IDE tools and languages for programming Oracle. Of course InterBase users (are there any?) would certainly take it on the chin.
• Microsoft: Adding the Pascal language to Visual Studio by including Delphi would seem a natural to me, but everything else overlaps. Microsoft could of course provide an upgrade path for C++ Builder, C# Builder, JBuilder, and maybe even InterBase users, but Kylix users would be left out in the cold. Heck, they might even make a bid to keep anyone else from getting Kylix!
• Red Hat:  Red Hat might be interested in tying up this product line, especially if they open source it, but since a lot of Borland’s line runs on Windows, its seems a longshot.
• SAP: This lumbering giant is seeing threats all around, from Oracle to SalesForce.com and they might use this toolset to give them some real programmability as compared to ABAP. Who knows which of the tools they’d use and which they’d kill. But then again, this one’s a longshot and it wouldn’t be great for the faithful.
• Sybase: Sybase could pick up the Borland IDEs for the same reason as Oracle, and they might not even kill InterBase, they’d probably just rename it "Sybase <something>."  Of course, Sybase really is a second tier player and I don’t think purchasing these Borland assets would be great the faithful nor really do that much for Sybase’s databases.
• IBM: Given the broad reach, IBM might just buy the userbase and roll them into WebSphere somehow.  IBM has always been able to consume practically anything. Maybe they will do this too?
• Sun: There’s a chance Scott will buy to pick up JBuilder and Kylix, and keep the rest out of other’s hands, but I doubt that’s likely.
• Novell: This one is interesting.  With Borland’s IDEs Novell could go toe to toe with Microsoft Visual Studio but instead optimize for Mono.  (I’ve always thought Novell should have purchased Borland years ago; maybe it will happen now.)  This is one of the best scenarios I can see for all involved, but the fact that most of the tools heavily support Windows make me think it is not as likely I it would be interesting.
• SalesForce.com: Who’s got the most to gain? Me thinks is would be SalesForce.com.  With his AppExchange strategy, Marc Benioff could grab the Borland toolset and optimize for programming SalesForce’s APIs. Marc could also use Interbase as an engine for local caching of SalesForce.com data. If Marc buys, it could be really good for the Borland IDE tools faithful. But Marc will only maximize benefit from such as purchase if he opens access to the API to ALL SalesForce.com customers, not just Enterprise Edition and up.
• Google: This one’s a wildcard; they certainly could afford it!  With all their web services and APIs Google is offering, it would make great sense for them to offer a great set of developer tools to the mix; they’ve already shown a willingness to provide downloadable software with Google Pack.  I can see it now; all of Borland’s products would be freely available for download from http://devtools.google.com; talk about marketshare!  Microsoft, be afraid, be very afraid. This is probably the best option I can think of for the Borland IDE tools faithful and will further upset the balance of power between the Big M and the Big G.
• Amazon: Similar to Google, Amazon has lots of APIs it wants to offer; why not provide developer tools optimized for calling their APIs?
• eBay: Same rationale as Amazon.

Whew!  That’s all I can think of right now, but it’s alot, no?  I’d say the best three potentials would be Novell, SalesForce.com, and Google. I didn’t mean this to be an exhaustive list so if you have ideas for potential suitors I did not mention or if you think differently about one of the potential suitors then please by all means post your thoughts as a comment below.

amazon, delphi, ebay, google, ibm, microsoft, novellmono, oracle, redhat, salesforce.com, sap, sun, sybase, tools

When I saw that Google Base just went live, my first thought was "All your base are belong to us."  I fear this might be ironic.

After a quick Google I found I wasn’t the only one to have thought this.

google

I really love using Google for search, for news, and for my default home page.  I think they’ve done an awesome job of really meeting users needs when many others can’t or won’t.  I also expect to see them rapidly grow and expand into new lots of areas. As a technologist, I’m really looking forward to the many cool things they are going to make available for everyone to use.

On the other hand, Google scares me to death.  People love to hate Microsoft because of it’s marketshare in O/S and office suites with Windows and MS-Office, but I don’t think Microsoft controls the fortunes of so many small and medium-sized businesses nearly as heavily as Google. In terms of total number of businesses, at least in the USA, most live or die by their Google traffic today.  We had a glitch at Xtras.Net that caused Google to remove us from their index for a few days, and our sales dropped by over 40%!!!  Many also hate WalMart because of how they have crushed most local businesses replacing them with a behemoth that is locally ubiquitious and pays practically slave wages.

However, I’m thinking people will soon look back on Microsoft and WalMart as a very benevolent dictators when compared with the future of Google.  Google’s mantra may be "Do no evil", but I’m pretty sure the truth contained in the old adage "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" will prove to be undeniably intoxicating when compared to the early ideology of a few idealists who where at the time isolated from reality.

How soon will it be before we hear the calls to investigate Google on grounds of anti-trust?  I for one am starting to believe that sooner is better than later.

I guess time will tell…

business, economics, google, microsoft, monopolies

Ever since I first started browsing the web, I’ve wished for a home page that would keep track of where I surfed and then show me a list of dynamically-generated bookmarks that are in descending order of the ones I use most. For example, if I go to Google News a lot, news.google.com should dynamically show up in my list. After all, why not use the fact I go to these sites a lot to help me get there more quickly?

Now that I’ve started using Google’s Personalized Home Page for each of my machine’s browser home page, I see a light at the end of the tunnel as they could (probably) easily implment this to enhance their list of static bookmarks.  Of course it would need a few other features, such as the ability for me to say "do not include this URL" in case I wanted to keep the fact away from my wife that I visit playboy.com a lot (well, actually, I don’t and I’m not married; it was just an example. :)

It would also be nice to be able to "pin" certain URLs at the top, and then allow me to order those URLS. Better yet, let give me a link that allows me to transfer them to the list of static bookmarks, and then omit any URLs in my static bookmarks from my dynamically-generated list.

Lastly, as with static URLs, it would be nice if it would let me label my urls so that I could have "Google News" displayed in my dynamically generated list instead of "news.google.com."

Anyway, here’s hoping someone working Google’s Personalized Home Page project sees this, and/or someone at Microsoft who might build a better service than Google’s in the near future via a combination of Internet Explorer & MSN (although given Microsoft’s recent history of beating Google with better solutions, I kind of doubt it that ltater will happen.)

favorites, freetools, google

For years I’ve kept an HTML file of links in the My Document directory called "MyHomePage.htm" because nobody ever created a home page service that worked for me.  Well, Google finally has and hence I’ve switched all my different machine’s browsers to point to my Google Personalized Home Page:

Why do I like it?  It’s clean and simple and let’s me easily create a list of bookmarks, plus it lists my recent Google searches and lets me add other things like links to news sites and/or any RSS feed out there. It’s by no means perfect yet, but it was good enough to get a jaded old hack like me to switch, and it’s only version 1.0!

Check it out and create your own Google Personalized Home Page at http://www.google.com/ig

favorites, freetools, google, webarchitecture

As my second post I guess I’ll tell potential readers a little about myself and my company.

I live in Atlanta, Georgia USA where I have lived most of my life. From 1981 to 1988 I attended Georgia Tech to get a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and an "honorary" degree in Computer Science. I gave myself that "honorary" degree because I found out too late that I loved computers and hated engineering. I took many ICS[1] classes and aced all of them except in assembler (I choked on the final and got a "B"), but none of my ICS classes counted towards my ME degree. My grades in my ME classes were, shall we say, less than stellar; I had a mantra as my academic career started coming to a close: "D" for "D"egree!  If only I had switched my major early on…

From 1987 to 1990, I together with two others formed a partnership called The DSW Group for consulting and training Nantucket’s Clipper, now a product of Computer Associates[2].

Clipper was/(is) a DOS-based programming lanaguage that evolved from its humble beginnings to become quite an interesting language. It’s main competitor was FoxPro, and I cried when CA bought Nantucket, and Microsoft bought Fox instead of Clipper.

While at DSW I focused on having DSW become the leading training and consulting company in Clipper. In those days, I was very much a head’s down programmer and very pendantic about "my" Clipper language and the “right“ way to program. Let’s just say a mere mention of FoxPro by a visitor almost got him chased out of the office!

Around 1990 I developed wanderlust and, leaving The DSW Group in the worthy hands of my former partners Terry Dietzler and Ed Weber, went to the Washington DC area.  In northern Virginia, ironically my birthplace, I went to work as Director of Training for Financial Dynamics (FDI) with Michael Horwith and Steven Delbianco (now VP for Public Policy at ACT.)  FDI was acquired by Spectrum Technology Group in November 1997.

While in the DC area I met John Kaster (John is now with Borland Developer Relations) and he agreed to put up with my perfectionism and help me finish a book[3] on Clipper to be published by Addison Wesley. After what appeared to be eons Programming in Clipper 5 was born, which achieved critical acclaim but alas reached the market far too late to be a commercial success.

After a year in DC, I guess I became homesick and decided to head back to Atlanta. Though I loved working with Michael and Steve at Financial Dynamics, I felt the need to start a gig exclusively my own, which I named Expert Education (EEI).

I ran EEI as a Clipper training company until the end of 1994. By that time nobody wanted to be trained on Clipper anymore. This was sad because Clipper had some awesome language features, some of which are just starting to show up in .NET, and the Windows version which they called Visual Objects was even far cooler, but alas it was being planned and marketed by Computer Associates, not Microsoft. You get the picture.

However, in late 1993, having been frustrated with EEI’s inability to market our training classes w/o the use of CA’s mailing list (sometimes they would let us use it, other times they would not), I recognized something special in the Clipper-Only Tools catalog of 3rd party tools produced by a company called Zac[4]. Within six months they practically owned the ability to market to Clipper developers. Knowing I could not compete with them in Clipper, I (thankfully) decided to target a market for 3rd party tools for a product I knew absolutely nothing about how to program: Visual Basic!

So in March 1994 I formed a seperate company and named it VBxtras to produce a printed catalog of tools for Visual Basic developers. We christened it “The Ultimate Tools Catalog for Visual Basic.“  And it was.  One of the main reasons to start VBxtras was to promote Expert Education’s new Visual Basic training classes. Of course after little more than six months I decided to heck with training and to pour everything into VBxtras.

I took off my programmer hat and put on my marketer hat. We launched the first catalog in June/July 1994, and accelerated from there. How did it do? Well, I was lucky enough to put together a great team and, let’s just say, we took a wild ride all the way by 1999 to be listed as #123 on the Inc 500 list. Of course we changed the name to Xtras, Inc. in 1995 in order to dabble in other things besides Visual Basic, but none of them went anywhere so in 1999 we decided to focus back exclusively on Visual Basic developer tools.

In 1994 we offered tremendous value to both developer and vendor. We made a market where one had not previously existed as resellers of the day were paying no attention to “that toy language” Visual Basic. With VBxtras, I was a developer who liked "toys" (the components, not the language) and I wanted a reference guide that helped me quickly find and select from every single one available. In those days I didn’t worry much about profit, I just worried about getting every single vendor’s products into our catalog, and about providing as much information as possible that a developer would want so he could choose to which one met his needs the best.

That is until Microsoft decided to start promoting .NET. As I learned about .NET, my desire returned to program full time (though I doubt I ever will (be able to.)  .NET had most of the cool things that Clipper and Visual Objects had, but it came from Microsoft, and was (at least partially) designed by Anders Heilsberg, the man behind both Delphi and Turbo Pascal[5].

But .NET concerned us as we feared it could badly affect our business model. After all, "C# programmers are never going to buy tools from a placed called ‘VBxtras.’" So we decided to launch a new product line complete with a new name: Xtras.Net. We dubbed Xtras.Net "Your Resource for Quality .Net Tools" and launched a huge printed catalog of 3rd party tools for .NET in 2002.  So how has Xtras.Net done thus far? Well, frankly, not as well by comparison as did VBxtras during its first few years.

With Xtras.Net we had 8+ years of experience, but also 8+ years of baggage. When we started VBxtras, we had nothing else to distract us.  With Xtras.Net, running VBxtras distracted us.  Plus, when we started VBxtras the whole company had that "new start-up smell!" The staff when we started Xtras.Net had been here a while and was no longer a start-up staff.  It wasn’t possible to get 5+ year employees to put in all 16 hour days for months on end so that we could achieve the same goals we had for VBxtras in the beginning: to be The #1 Reference Guide for .NET.

So we haven’t done as well as I would have liked. Plus the world has changed greatly. In 1994 developers could not go from Google straight to a vendor’s website, pay for software on the spot , and download the bits and an unlock key. But today they can[6]. And in 1994, we didn’t have to compete with a venture capital backed dot-com that probably lost a dollar on ever dollar in sales for its first five years in business, all while we had to break even each month[7].

But we also haven’t done badly either, it is just a new world. I’m frustrated because we could have made a much greater positive impact for .NET developers than we have thus far, but by other’s accounts, we’ve done quite well.  We, like everyone else whose business has been negatively impacted by the Internet, have had to evolve, and will continue to evolve a lot more in the coming years.

As a matter of fact, some of the things we have planned for our evolution and that we are finally close to implementing have me tremendously excited. They excite me because I believe they can allow Xtras to transcend its current business model, and more importantly, impact developers and development in a very positive manner over the next several years. How do I know these things would be positive? Because I’m a developer at heart, and the things we have planned are things the developer in me would desperately love to see come to pass.

So thanks for reading, and stay tuned. Xtras next 10 years should be an even wilder ride than the last. In a good way, that is. :-)

 Footnotes

1. ICS: Information and Computer Science
    
2. Computer Associates: Where old software goes to die.
    
3. Programming in Clipper 5: Of course Amazon has continued to this date to list the authors as me, Ed Weber, and Terry Dietzler even though the latter two dropped out at the beginning and John, whose name is on the cover, is the real co-author. I’ve even contacted Amazon about this, but to no avail.
    
4. Zac Software: Since acquired by Global Computer, and about a year later, unceremoniously closed.
    
5. I cut my programming teeth on Turbo Pascal in college.
    
6. Google: Developers that go straight to vendors and by pass resellers pay full price, and don’t gain any of the benefits resellers offer. One of those benefits is resellers will act as their advocate when they have a problem with the vendor, among other things which I’ll cover over the coming months in future posts. I know this may sound self-serving, but hey, it’s my blog! Seriously though, if you’ll give me the benefit of the doubt and keep up with the subject over the next several months, I might be able to cast a different light on it for you. And I promise you, it won’t be my only topic (not even close!) as what I really want to talk about is programming in .NET and related.
    
7. VC-backed dot-com: Yeah, but now they’ve run out of all that outlandish VC and they actually have to make profit! Ha! Let the games begin!
    

aboutme, atlantaga, ca, clipper, clipperonlytools, computerassociates, dotnet, dsw, eei, experteducation, fdi, financialdynamics, foxpro, gatech, google, inc500, mechanicalengineering, microsoft, nantucket, stevendelbianco, thedswgroup, turbopascal, vbxtras, visualbasic, xtras, xtras.net, zaccatalog