Borland marketing

I think I’ve figure out what does bother me last few years about Borland and Delphi in particular

NO INFORMATION

Today all sales are about information, about Branding, about acknowledgment.

• There is no information – almost the only place you would see Borland name is Borland web-site and MS partner CD (last one nobody look at, but almost everybody had it at some point). There is no information campaign anywhere in major sources.
  – Do you want to read about Borland team or something going on campus – go and read Bay Area newspapers
  – Do you want to hear anything about Borland on wallstreet – go and visit Yahoo BORL finances message board
  – Do you want to find anything about Borland products – go and spend couple hours on Borland web-site – you might be lucky to find something, you might not
  – MS marketing team does not feel danger anymore when someone brings Borland’s name. They ignore it as a small fly which is around for a while, but will go away eventually…

Any information is strongly localized, well hidden, not well presented, and not well covered. We are biggest national secret.

• There is no Branding effort – about 5-10 years ago, “Made in Borland” was a brand name. Someone who did spend time in industry did hear about some of the Borland products – it could be Borland C++ or Borland Pascal, or even Borland ResourceWorkshop. You look today and there is no such brand anymore: products are vague, unknown; “Borland” as a brand was lost during all these acquisitions, merges, renaming; there is no style “a-la-Borland”… it is lost, forgotten, disappearing,…
• Borland style for products today is “patch-work quilt” – no unified style, unified standard, …
• Quality of the product is now became big topic for conversations.
• Nobody anymore talking about Pascal is better or C is better – no reason – yes, for once it is now very close, but also there is no need for it, pointless and not worth of argument. We do not do it even for fun.
• Delphi 2005 has been around for almost a year – visit Delphi component web-site, see how many of them was ported into D2005. You would see that many of the free components freeze in D5/D6/D7 state… with number of component falling down as we go. People do not do it for fun anymore. Yes, there is open source projects and they might consume 10-20-30% of effort, but I doubt it.
• There is no fun to work with Borland products – price, style, quality, job demands, just old…

Next quote very well describe current marketing effort.

When was the last time Borland took real interest in the small independent VAR account? Less than 20 developers? I have *never* heard of Borland salespeople dropping in on “choose-a-place” folks…, and there are at least a dozen software development shops here with nationwide sales. We’re less than 1-2-3-4-5 hours away from HQ, for goodness sakes.