Daily Archives: May 7, 2008

borland, codegear, delphi, software development

Codegear sold to Embarcadero

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CodeGear, Borland’s developer tools business, is to be acquired by Embarcadero; though to be more precise, CodeGear is being acquired by the owner of Embarcedero, a private equity company called Thoma Cressey Bravo.

Embarcadero has a range of database and data modeling products, including ER/Studio, EA/Studio, RapidSQL, PowerSQL and DBArtisan.

This is the end of a long road – CodeGear was put up for sale in 2006.

Good news? Insofar as it ends a long period of uncertainty, yes. On the other hand, I sense that many of CodeGear’s customers have valued its renewed focus on software development, as opposed to application lifecycle management, modeling, change management and all those other enterprisey things. Embarcadero just might take it back in that direction. From the press release:

Customers and partners will benefit from Embarcadero’s ability to help fully integrate their application development lifecycle, automate error-prone tasks and dramatically increase their productivity.

Talk of “dramatically increased productivity” is bound to strike fear into the hearts of those who like their dev tools mean and lean.

The problem from a business perspective is that enterprise sales are where the money is, and plain old IDEs and compilers are thoroughly commodotized. Eclipse, NetBeans, Visual Studio Express…

That said, CodeGear still has some interesting products, and increased resources for things like quality control and documentation would do them no harm at all.

 

google, salesforce.com, search, Uncategorized

Running a business on Salesforce.com plus Google Adwords

At the Dreamforce Europe party this evening I took the opportunity to chat to some Salesforce.com customers. Most were traditional CRM customers (and seemed happy on the whole), but one person I spoke to used the platform more extensively. His business repairs domestic appliances. The entire booking system runs on Salesforce; and they use a mashup with Google Maps to inform their engineers of upcoming jobs.

I was told that Google Adwords is the most effective advertising they do. They have done some fine-tuning in order to get the best results. If potential customers search for upmarket brands, the wording of the ad might emphasise professionalism, whereas for budget brands the wording might focus on value for money. They analyzed the results and have proved the benefits of these adjustments. They do not use the content network at all, as they only want to target customers actually searching for something related to their business.

Another twist: they like being able to switch off Adwords temporarily when they have too much work.

All of this has been achieved on a low budget, mostly by configuring Salesforce rather than writing code. Interesting.

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.net, google, internet, salesforce.com, web authoring

Marc Benioff: Google deal is aimed at a common enemy

Here at Dreamforce Europe, I asked Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff about the company’s agreement with Google, in which Salesforce becomes an OEM for Google Apps. We saw this demonstrated in the keynote. You can start a email via  Gmail from within a Salesforce contact. When sent – provided you click the Salesforce send button and not the Gmail send button – the email is added to the contact history. A similar feature lets you attach a Google document to a Salesforce record.

It’s a useful feature; but long term, will Salesforce.com and Google be competitors rather than partners? It is a natural question, since both companies are promoting their services as a platform for applications. Salesforce has the Apex programming language, while Google has its App Engine. According to Benioff, App Engine is primarily for Python developers, while Salesforce.com is a platform for enterprise applications. This struck me as downplaying Google’s likely ambitions in the enterprise market.

I therefore asked Benioff whether the agreement with Google included any non-compete element, or whether Google might be a future platform competitor. He did not answer my question, but said:

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

The identity of the enemy is unspecified; but given that Benioff used Microsoft .NET as the example of what his platform is supposedly replacing, and that Google docs competes with Microsoft Office, and that Benioff makes constant jibes at the complexity and expense of developing for Windows, I guess we can draw our own conclusions.

For sure, it did little to allay my suspicion that Salesforce.com and Google will not not always be as warm towards one another.

As an aside, there are ironies in Benioff’s characterization of .NET. Microsoft launched .NET as a “platform for web services”, which is exactly what Salesforce.com has become. Microsoft was a key driver behind the standardization and adoption of SOAP, which is the main protocol in the Salesforce.com API.

Uncategorized

Neil Young’s controversial Blu-ray archive announcement

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Old rocker Neil Young announced at the JavaOne conference that he will issue a chronological greatest hits/archive package on a 10 disc Blu-ray set.

And here is something really new, we will be able to add content to already released Blu-ray Disc archive volumes by downloading it, whether it is music, film or vintage recording sessions, recently found photographs, or other archival materials that were located after the release of that volume. Users will be able to download any of these archival materials and they will automatically be assigned to their place in the Chronology timeline … this could potentially include content updates such as music, film, adding new photos and providing tour information. It could also provide the ability to support dynamic fan community features such as message boards, concert reviews or even enable fans to use a BD-Live donation mechanism to help support the Bridge School.

Sounds like a web site to me. There will also be a DVD set, but only Blu-ray will offer the full interactive experience, powered by Java.

Of course, Blu-ray is a handy mechanism for delivering large high-resolution audio files to the consumer; but will users take to this kind of hybrid approach? Young says we will love the sound quality; but the general public seems tolerant of almost any sound quality that is good enough; a few of us complain about iTunes music at 128kpbs, but most listeners seem happy enough.

There is a discussion on Steve Hoffman’s audiophile message board which includes many of the fans who have been waiting years for archive Neil Young material. The response is mixed:

This is cool and all, but I have to say that when it comes to music, I still want it on CD, not on any video hybrid disc. I don’t want to have to turn on my TV to listen, I want to be able to play it in my car, etc.

and this:

And now this, expecting us to buy a whole new medium just to get his archives… I don’t want to watch this stuff, I want to play it and enjoy the MUSIC, on the musical formats I already own.

It reminds me of a very cool interactive CD I have somewhere, covering Bob Dylan’s chronology; it was called Highway 61 Interactive and came out in 1995. The disk included unreleased work and a multimedia presentation covering the recording of Like a Rolling Stone. As I recall, it was not a big success, which accounts for why it was not followed by similar titles for other artists. Now it is sought-after by collectors, but not that easy to play; it uses Quicktime but thirteen years later there are compatibility issues.

I will look forward to Neil Young’s set, if I can afford it, but it will be a niche item, and most people will buy his old hits on CD or download.

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