InterBase at Borland
When Borland bought Ashton-Tate in October, 1991, they got also the InterBase with it (version 3 at that time). Shortly thereafter they decided that they needed the technology in-house, so they moved about 1/3 of the company, including most of the senior engineers, to Scott's Valley. Several senior people from support also moved west, and most of the local sales offices remained intact.
At that time, both Jim Starkey and Ann Harrison went to pursuit their other interests. But Ann never really break away from InterBase, and she was a valuable member of InterBase community centred around MERS InterBase mailing list (now defunct, but searchable archive is still available) for years. Thanks to her unselfish willingness to share her detailed knowledge of InterBase internals, many developers descovered the beauty and power of IB's design and became loyal followers (and that at the end saved the InterBase in 1999)
Borland's custody of InterBase was unbalanced, and greatly depended on "changes in the weather" as Borland changed his focus and priorities (along with top management) several times over the decade they catered it (before IB became Open Source). While Borland did a lot of good to InterBase, they never really make the best account of it to unleash its power in the market. The main Borland's achievements were:
Implementation of stored procedures
Windows port and the SuperServer architecture
Novell Netware port (discontinued after v5.6)
Increased populatiry of InterBase thanks to its incorporation into their RAD products from day one.
On the other side, Borland was constantly criticized for lack of marketing efforts (not only those related to InterBase), and especially for poor integration of InterBase with RAD tools that would really unleash its power (it took five(!) versions of Delphi before Borland licensed(!) a component library to provide native access to InterBase) and disestablishment of free deployment licenses for Local InterBase for Windows after Delphi 1 (It's very likely that we would saw the demise of flat databases far earlier, if Borland would continue to offer the free deployment licenses for Local InterBase after 1995, appart from boost in popularity of InterBase - as we can see now, when InterBase is Open Source).
To be honest, all these complaints should account on Borland's top management rather on InterBase division at Borland. While Borland's top management was busy changing company's name from Borland to Inprise to Inprise/Borland.com to Borland/Inprise to Borland Software Corp., and moving people from right to left and vice versa, InterBase R&D and technical support engineers along with sales people did their best for InterBase in constraints imposed to them, and they were always very responsive to their customers and the community at large. But it was obviously not enough for Dale Fuller, the interim CEO of Borland in 1999...
|
|
