Turbo Delphi 2006, Turbo C++ 2006, and JBuilder Turbo 2008 are no longer available. You can download a free 30-day trial version of the latest Delphi, C++Builder, and JBuilder products and learn more about them using the links below.
For those who are new to Delphi (hard to imagine, but I guess that there might be some new users), Turbo Delphi Explorer was a slightly crippled version of Delphi 2006 that Borland made available for free. It was like the regular Delphi but without command line tools, and you could not install third party stuff in the IDE (but you could create and use third party components in code). So it included the VCL source code, you could create database applications and could even make commercial projects with it. It was a very nice offer, especially when you think that this came from the late Borland (the bad one, who didn't care about developers and firmly believed that the future was in ALM tools --I'm glad that they finally went down the drain along with their ALM crap).
So if you wanted to learn Delphi or start a small business and you didn't have a thousand dollars to spend on a copy of Delphi you could just download Turbo Delphi and do real work with it. At a later time, if you needed maximum productivity or just loved to have a palette full of components, you could buy the regular Delphi. This made sense but, did it help increase Delphi sales? Probably not. Did it hurt? Probably not either. As usual, Borland marketing was nonexistent, nobody knew that Turbo Delphi existed, and if they did they didn't care, because no one likes to use products from a company that has been slowly dying since the end of the nineties.
When Borland, in a decisive step towards ALM glory, got rid of the Developer Tools Group, many people had big hopes that Embarcadero would be the home that Delphi had always needed. I kinda doubted it. When I saw that the same bunch of people that had been managing Delphi under the Borland name were now in Embarcadero, I suspected that everything would stay more or less the same. Except that I didn't expect that Embarcadero would kill the Turbo Explorer downloads.
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5 comments:
Definitively, Embarcadero is doing a pathetic job with Delphi. I'm in full regret of have chosen Delphi as my favorite language, since I'm locked in Delphi 7 since 2002. No way out, I'm learning C++ in an attempt to replace Delphi as my primary programming language.
Farewell Delphi, I've really had good times with ya.
I still having a small hope that Delphi will survive (something like Em-ro's enlightment from "above", lol) because C++ cant fully replace Delphi <3
I think that Delphi will survive at least in the machines of all the individuals and companies that have hundreds of thousands of lines of code written in Delphi. Unfortunately they dont have a choice. But as a product I think that Delphi has its days counted. There has to be a limit to the number of times that a customer pays for a pointless upgrade.
I agree, C++ isnt going to replace Delphi, first because nobody seems to agree on what subset of C++ to use, and on top of everything it is slow as molasses. I have the hope that what happened in the desktop publishing industry could repeat here. The QuarkXPress guys, as the only player in their market segment, thought that they could maintain the outrageous prices forever and never make any real updates to their product. Then one day Adobe presented InDesign and people migrated massively.
What if the next release brings a Delphi Express edition, like microsoft, would you change your mind or you think that Delphi is death, by the way the natural replacement for Delphi is C#, has a lot of similiarities.
Oscar thank you so much for everything you said.
I totally agree with your points about controlling the market. The first to implement that was Philippe Kahn when he decided to price Turbo Pascal at $49 while the big guys such as IBM were charging hundreds of dollars for stuff that you had to run from the command line. Now the people responsible for the demise of Borland excuse themselves claiming that it was a different market. Oh really? Maybe the problem was not the market, but the fact that Borland made mistake after mistake for more than a decade.
This is really sad to me because I used to love Borland when I was a kid. I read about that allmighty language called C++ on magazines and books and everyone said that Borland had the best tools, so I dreamed with getting my hands on a copy of Borland C++ (there was no Internet then). Many years later I got them all. I still have them on a CD, and even though I know that I will never use them and my head says that it is outdated stuff, my heart says 'this is rock solid, top quality software, made by people who cared about performance'. You could even say that those products had personality, they were created with the firm intention to predate their competitors, while today every Delphi release nearly comes with a letter of apology for not following faithfully the Microsoft design guidelines.
My motivation to code Delphi Distiller is a mix of things. I wish to see Delphi thrive, but I
don't see it happening in Embarcadero's hands, because Embarcadero isn't passionate about Delphi or about anything for that matter. They are there to milk the cash cow just like Borland did. Release a new pointless update every year and --this is key-- fill the website with the latest buzzword targeted at managers, making sure that they understand how important it is to buy the latest Delphi, which will make them so much more productive than they ever imagined.
So if Distiller can make the lives of other developers a little easier, that's the best of all. And if this hurts Embarcadero's sales, so be it. To my mind they deserve it. But I don't think that I can make a difference in the future of Delphi. I believe that the only ones who can do the miracle are those in possession of the source code to Delphi (hint to ex-Borland employees.. what about an anonymous leak?) Then we would see true innovation.
As of a Delphi Express in the Microsoft way, if it was accompanied with some clever marketing I think that it would be very good for Delphi and Embarcadero. Otherwise it would only cannibalize their own sales of Delphi Pro. But I don't see Embarcadero taking any chances. They are just too happy that a ridiculously small company like them got their hands on a product like Delphi. Now it's time to spend the rest of their lives milking the cow.
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