Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Book Review: In Search of Stupidity

I brought the book In Search of Stupidity 2nd Edition.
The best laugh I had was Chapter 7:

Frenchmen Eats Frog, Chokes to Death:
Borland and Phillipe Kahn
(This review comes from the 2nd Edition, not the 1st Edition)

Insult upon Insult
The book starts off very simply with purchasing Ansa (the owner of Paradox database) then Surpass database (the product was renamed to QuattroPro). Where Kahn's behaviour got the better of him, was the purchase of Ashton-Tate (the makers of DBase). Most of Ashon-Tate's employees were treated very badly, destroying customer's databases, and AT's employees took time to call many key DBase gurus and told them how bad the Borland acquisition of DBase became.

Borland (by Kahn) made DBase "a diry language" and allowed DBase to rot, never bothered to fix many bugs (sounds similar?). Without any decent compiler, DBase languished. The Dbase community got nervous and then migrated to FoxPro.

Borland became Imprise and then Borland, then (some nonsense name), then later CodeGear and then their Tools divison got sold to Embarcadero.

Delphi Hater's Experience
Borland's high-handed tactic was to brand anyone who critized Borland's products troll, trouble-maker and insult upon insult.

Take for example, someone commenting how bad Delphi.NET is, and then branded as Troll (trouble-maker).
http://groups.google.com/group/borland.public.delphi.non-technical/browse_thread/thread/bf1d883ea6e71e84/62956bfe7291ea57

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