Borland? Or Bore-bland?

I was at the Orange County Delphi User Group Meeting last night. It was a special meeting because John Kaster flew all the way down from Scots Valley with a promise to tell us "all the reasons why we should make Delphi 8 part of our .NET plans," according to the e-mail advertisement. I guess that's a popular subject these days since this meeting had the largest attendance I’ve seen in years. Too bad Kaster couldn’t deliver the goods.

I should mention that I was 10 minutes late, so I can’t speak to the very start of the meeting. When I arrived, Kaster was winding down from some introductory remarks about how Borland is repositioning itself as the "whole development lifecycle" company (or something like that) -- complete with an epiphany-inspiring puzzle piece logo that's sure to change my life forever.

Kaster then turned the floor over to two of his colleagues in the Starteam division (which is still located here in OC). They proceeded to bore us to death for almost an hour. Try as I might, I couldn't figure out why they were even up there. This had nothing to do with either Delphi or .NET. At first, I thought maybe they were leading up to some news about Starteam, but my anticipation faded fast when they started droning on with a demo of how to set up a Starteam project. Talk about old news! As a longtime Starteam user, I can attest that there was not one scintilla of information less than 3 years old. Maybe it was because of my seat in the back of the room -- one of those folding chairs with an attached writing desk -- but I could swear I was back in high school and had been sentenced to detention.

When they got to Q&A, I decided to throw them a bone. In keeping with their development lifecycle theme, I asked about how well Starteam integrates with their requirements tracking tool, Caliber RM. "For example," I asked. "Say a project manager is looking through the bugs that have been reported as change requests in Starteam and decides that a few of them should really be treated as feature requests for the next version. What facilities are there for converting such bug reports into Caliber requirements?" The answer I got was really convoluted, but what I think I heard was essentially "Ctrl-X/Ctrl-V." Am I missing something? How does the self-proclaimed thought leader in development environment integration expect to thrive by selling us bundled products that don’t integrate?

Needless to say, by the time Kaster got back in front of the projector and started to actually talk about Delphi 8, I was numb. I made a valiant effort to follow along and understand what big things Delphi 8 brings to the .NET table, but I didn’t see any. All I saw was Microsoft finger-pointing and all I heard was more old news: "Live data at design time this" and "still not quite drag-and-drop form design that." Ho, hum. By 8:45 I was counting the minutes until the meeting ended, hoping to salvage what was left of the evening with one of our famous parking-lot “after-meetings.” But the meeting ran long and there was still no end in sight, so I bolted.

A Brave New World Wide Web

"We don’t know what the web is for but we’ve adopted it faster than any technology since fire." -- David Weinberger (co-author), The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, 2000

According to Cluetrain, the magic of the Internet is that we are all finding our voices and communicating directly with each other. According to a Harris Interactive poll, 69% of American adults were users of the Internet in 2003 (as opposed to just 9% in 1995). What are these 146 million people talking about? Everything. We’re comparing notes and sharing first-hand knowledge. Cluetrain co-author Christopher Locke calls the Net "a powerful multiplier for intellectual capital." We are talking on many levels in many roles. We are doing it instantaneously and without filters.

One of the ways we are communicating is consumer-to-consumer. I probably don’t need to tell you the worth of reviews posted to www.amazon.com and www.epinions.com. You may have even found one valuable enough that you wanted to "pay it forward" by posting a review of your own, right? Us consumers collectively know more about any given product than the manufacturer does. After all, we have the company’s employees drastically outnumbered. Now that we are talking directly to each other, we are rapidly becoming a force to be reckoned with. Companies that decide to listen and join in on the conversation with an open and honest attitude will keep our business. Companies that don’t won’t.

One of the first causalities of this Brave New World Wide Web are monolithic computer software companies that don’t know how to give their customer’s what they really want. Enter open source software. Check out the first four winners of the newly announced Open Source Awards. Whether or not you find those projects to be useful, personally, you will certainly find it interesting to see the motivation behind their existence. What do they portend? Will all software go open source? Hardly. But the ones that remain commercial will have to be just as adaptable in their own way.