David Intersimone, by most known as “David I”, is a respectable employer of Borland (already 20 years, he claims). In the latest post on his weblog, he shows us a graphical presentation of the development of software-development itself. Of course one can not help but noticing the similarities in the way Borland/Inprise/Borland developped itselves over the years. Switching from lots of small fish (individual developers) to a couple of really big fish (the enterprises). To stay with the fishing-analogy: if you want to catch more fish to bring in more money, why not expand your fleet with some large ships to bring in the really large fish, and keep the smaller boats to supply the market with small fish too. No, Borland sees it differently: sell the smaller ships to buy a new big boat. As we all know, big fish are more difficult to find, harder to catch, and you can only handle a couple of them with one boat. I’m not sure if this is the winning strategy. I complained about it before (do a search): Borland is getting too expensive for the one-man-band companies out there.
Oh, and while looking at the graph, which side did you feel most comfortable with? Left or right? Another thing: what’s the difference between “2000 – Process Centric” and “2005+ – Role based”? Let me tell you: none. Processes are done by certain roles, if you have your organisation straight. There is more history-repeats-itselves in the graph, but that is up to the reader.
Note: The x-axis is used for the timescale, the y-axis is the price of the Borland products, with an exponentional-scale to allow (misleading) linear progression.
Thank you for commenting on my Blog entry. There was not specific x and y axis timescale, the graph was meant to talk about the software engineering/tooling/product “epochs” that have taken place. I will update the post to add some words to make sure there is no misunderstanding by readers. We are still focused on all aspects of software development. You can’t have software organization or team optimizations/solutions without focusing on the developer role. We are doing just that. It is additive! We have all sizes of “boats” to find all sizes of developers, organizations, and companies. We are working on some plans to extend our reach further “down” into the developer world. Stay tuned!
David I
Borland