A Nick of time

The problems with Delphi may be too great to fix

Your reviewer was saddened by Nick Hodges leaving Embarcadero. Like many others who have joined, like Mr. Chee Wee Chua (Chewy), Tod Nelson and others, it may be perhaps, the problem with Delphi lies in beyond just a single individual to change Borland's culture.

Total Eclipse of the Delphi

The problems started right after Delphi 6. For those who can remember, the best versions of Delphi was Delphi 5, Delphi 6, Delphi 7. Delphi 7 marked the "golden age" of Delphi, where you could compile once and supposedly recompile it with Kylix and almost get a working product in Linux... The bad things about Delphi is Borland's "depreciation" of many key technologies and leaving people to complain at it...

.. until Nick Hodges came and turned many things around. If there was one thing Nick did, it would be to soften the cold, hard and distasteful attitudes and behavior that persisted in Borland. Your reviewer and others who complained on the newsgroups would get cold replies and insults on Borland's newsgroups, very slow or non-existent replies to problems and issues. it became so bad, that even Mr. Luigi Sandon said that he would not even consider buying Delphi SA until many bugs are fixed. In usual newsgroup style, Mr. Luigi Sandon was told he was a troll, trouble-maker, etc. - except that if this happened on Sybase newsgroups, SAP R/3 internal customer support forums, or on other customer-service oriented companies, the offenders would have lost their job immediately.

The unlikely Nick
If Nick lost his job because of the comments on that post, other people should have taken the fall instead of him like...

• the manager of the almost-unusable-Help-Files department,
   
• the persons who answered the phone and could not call back or even send an email,
  
  
• the head of the almost useless marketing department which for some reason, can never seem to explain why Delphi has so many issues and the need to pay so much money every year without an assurance of the latest Delphi version except continuous annual payments,
  
  
• the head of the report-writer department for which your reviewer and many other people will surely uninstall Rave Reports and buy FastReports or something else,
  
  
• the head of the TCP/IP department who face the deluge of almost "every version of Indy breaks something", almost "every version of Indy has some screwball problem" issues.
  
  
• the head of the cloud department (IntraWeb) for which TeamB blogs talk about ASP.NET all the time (which tool did they use?)
   
• One slip of the tongue from Nick Hodges and everyone knows the internal bug tracker they use is based on Java/ Atlassan Jira, Confluence instead of the dummy NET1.1 Quality Central public website and the dummy DNEWS newsgroup web-gateway Embarcadero replaced,
  
  
• the head of the almost every Department which Nick Hodges has to expedite customer requests from and to.

which all leads to Nick being the fall guy for all the troubles that are happening. If there was change, change would come from getting the people to do the opposite of what they are doing now.

If there was something Embarcadero would do, it would be to find a better razor blade so that all the nicks and cuts that Nick did, would be more effective upon Embarcadero's corporate culture so that sales would increase, customer satisfaction would increase.. instead of this "megaphone diplomacy" which everything is taken to the newsgroups and this blame game starts.

Maybe get a doctor to do house-calls instead...

The week after Nick left, it is business as usual, the same old Borland appears from underneath. What would it take to improve Embarcadero's image?

• Get a group of people who are pro-customer, pro-business, pro-Delphi and press for Delphi to be used everywhere. Not ones and twos...
  
  
• Get people who are proficient in dealing with those bugs. The best thing to do is stop new developments and make a "DELPHI4EVER" with all bugs fixed and release it to every customer who has brought Delphi,
  
  
• Get a community response (with at least minimum of 50,000 respondents) to vote to get a new report writer or at least get some help to Jim Gunkel of Nevrona Reports before the Rave party ends...
  
  
• Beg, borrow or at least get some kind of ORM or Persistence Model into Delphi. It would make Delphi go BOLDLY where no Delphi has gone before.
  
  (Once your reviewer used a Visual Studio ORM product, your reviewer cannot believe how much coding your reviewer used to do to do something simple vs. almost 90% less code written)
   
• and so on...

Of course, the clock is ticking... no 64-bit Delphi, no Delphi for Linux, no Delphi for Mac...

Your reviewer hope this situation will not happen:

Doctor, doctor, Delphi has a heart attack and needs massive cash-flow infusions and new management. All the vital organs are diseased and either need to be amputated or transplanted. Delphi is in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and is in bad shape and needs "strong dose of medicine" and better Corporate governance to make sure Delphi survives... Delphi needs fresh blood, vigorous support follow-up and sales physiotherapy. Delphi needs strong antibiotics to counter bug-infested organs. New X-Ray models and PET models needs to be done and...

Let's hope the new people, for whom Embarcadero chooses, know what they are doing before it's too late.

Embarcadero was smart enough to license SalesForce and Atlassian instead of going with StarTeam, CalibreRM, and Together.