Embarcadero closing down their Spanish office
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/06/24
Embarcadero closes down their spanish R&D office putting some 80 people on the street and diminishing the total Delphi R&D team.
Former Chief Scientist Allen Bauer commented:
The Spain office had taken on most of the IDE, Delphi RTL, GetIT, Installer, some DB, Bluetooth components, IoT, QA, and other miscellaneous tasks. They were by-far the largest single group working on RAD Studio. They were all a wonderful, dedicated, excited group of folks. They were eager to learn and truly enjoyed their jobs. I am deeply saddened by this development.
Source: [WayBack] Very bad news!
Related: [WayBack] Embarcadero Discussion Forums: Bad news for Delphi? …
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
Francisco Ruiz said
Could we make a crowdfunding of Delphi to make it open source at the end :-)
KM said
So it can end like the once mighty Watcom C++ compiler?
jpluimers said
Hopefully not.
KM said
Just pointing out that “open source” is not the “saviour of them all”. Developing Delphi would still require a not small effort (including QA), even if the product is reduced. And it requires the right people with the right skills. Unless you’re just interested in a free product as long as it is still usable…
jpluimers said
I totally agree. That’s what worries me about the approach Idera is taking.
jpluimers said
If you consider crows funding, read this: https://plus.google.com/u/0/115032677792043930563/posts/Z64rqPifndz
Wilfred Oluoch said
What the community needs is feedback from Embarcadero.
KM said
When ever do we received reliable feedback from Borland, Inprise, CodeGear, Embarcadero on this kind of news? Especially since the main PR guy is always the same?
There was almost no feedback when it was a public company, guess what you can obtain now it is a private one. Despite what they can tell you, they don’t care at all about any “community”, not even the paying one. Their main aim is to charge you more for less, and they can’t really tell you. So they just pretend nothing is happening… and wait for you to renew your “subscription” anyway.
KM said
Idera’s plan (from Popov update roadmap http://community.embarcadero.com/article/news/16416-product-roadmap-update)
More “structured outsourcing”
More marketing.
Every project I worked on which used “outsourcing” for non trivial tasks has been a bloodbath. It’s quite impossible to ensure a coherent vision, outsourced developers comes and go more often than not outsourced ones (outsources usually works by keeping wages low, so good ones go away as soon as they find a better paid job), you can’t train them properly, often they don’t understand the whole project scope and philosophy, and a lot of knowledge goes wasted anytime people changes.
What may work for Accenture for the usual commercial database fronted, may not work for more technically advanced projects like a development tool, framework, compiler, and especially, language. Unluckily, that’s what bad executive think. They just see the cost savings vs. the actual sales number. When the sales number start to crumble because customers get tired and angry of bad product quality, is usually too late.
Marketing, of course, can’t offset it but in the eyes of the most naive customer.
I expect Delphi entering a spiral of lame decisions (worse then what they already did in the recent past). Cantù is a company man, his contract tells what it can say (and may have provisions against bad mouthing the company) and almost nobody is willingly to quit his job without a good exit strategy. DavidI has always been a champion of telling blatant lies to developers, while ensuring his cozy chair is always ready whatever the owner is.
Barry WIlliams said
I stopped my Maintenance contract with Embarcadero/Idera last year for all these reasons. When Idera purchased RAD Studio, I sensed the end and I believe (IMHO) that this is the beginning of the end. Time to reconsider my compiler and library choices.
randombloger said
that would be a really waste of money – i dont think it will happen. People getting fired and hired all the time.
vicente said
In this history, i see only one problem. The history is true and …. the community (customers) yet not receive an explanation.
randombloger said
I would like to now if this means that we should look for an alternative and this is a slow end of delphi/c++ builder? This news and comments above just put some alert trigger on the future of d/c++b
Jason Chapman said
Nekad: Not nice, not true. Moreover than being an excellent Delphi bod – Marco has always been very straight forward and straight talking to the development community.
Joseph Mitzen said
Marco used to be very straight talking; since he joined Embarcadero he’s become quite the apologist. When he began deleting posts from his blog and threatening others with censorship, something he’d never done in all the years I’d been reading it, I knew he really had changed. Marco made a comment about appreciating the steady income when he took that job, and I’ve a feeling he can’t afford to lose it.
Senad said
No money – No funny
Paul said
Link to the source for the Allen Bauer comment please?
jpluimers said
The comment is in the thread I linked to.
Paul said
Yes and here some hot news.
Delphi and C++Builder Team now is only 8 developers
IDERA contract free lance developers without experience in Delphi and pay per job
Marco Cantu is not happy and thinking about to leave
David I is now IDERA employee, no more Embarcadero
IDERA’s plan was to take the database tools (more $$$) and get rid of developer tools
Soon they will shutdown Scotts Valley office, only few people still working there
Michael Swindell is the next one to leave the company
More to come
svismo nekad said
Dont worry …Marco Cantu will not leave. He is, what Italians call, a typical ‘leccaculo’.
David I said
Nekad: Marco is not a “leccaculo” (note: I looked up the definition). He is a world class Delphi developer, presenter, consultant and author. With your comment you tell the world how little you know about Marco and the Delphi community.
Victor van Uitert said
Err, David I?
Ignoring Svismo’s nasty words, can you comment on what Paul wrote above?
thaddyThaddy said
I was thinking the same, Victor ;) . Two remarks: 1) Indeed Marco is a decent Guy. 2) My American Italian is not as good as David’s. Maybe David can indeed shed some light on it in a more clear way. My insider thinks Paul is about right on many if not all his statements. Dunno?
Joseph Mitzen said
But Marco tows the company line now. When a Google Plus poster made a chart about the frequency of bug reports vs. bug closures, Marco dismissed it and announced he would put up his own. When several of us pointed out significant problems in his charts (I do data analysis for a living) Marco deleted all of our comments, made a post claiming to summarize what we’d posted (very incomplete), and made a few changes to his charts – particularly the titles, but not the data or methodology. To most readers, they would be just as misleading. This is the kind of thing he does now and it’s very disappointing.
None of which pays anything anymore. When it was announced Marco got the job, he made a comment in reply to mine on his blog about it being great to have a steady source of income now.
Nick Hodges stood up for us and got fired. I’ve been waiting to see if Marco would quit, get fired, or “join the dark side”. My money was on “quit”, but so far, it’s been “dark side”.
Wilfred Oluoch said
Joseph, we all love RAD Studio; Marco included. This should not turn to be about him; I don’t see the connection, anyway.
In as much as we are all sad to hear stories (yet, unconfirmed) that threaten the future of tools we love, lets not take it out on those who have helped build the community.
Marco has done much much more for Delphi than any of us have. Let’s accord him that respect.
Let’s put our energy on securing the future of these tools.
jpluimers said
Please go wash your mouth.
Wilfred Oluoch said
I support Marco. He is no “…” (note: I also, looked up the definition)
If there is any truth in the main story then perhaps it’s time for “Borland” to be revived and the tools re-purchased. Offer every current RAD Studio developer a chance to invest in the company.
Joseph Mitzen said
Borland was smart enough to get out of the developer tools industry. It was clear ten years ago that there wouldn’t be money to be made in development tools, particularly proprietary languages, anymore. Now we have even Microsoft and Apple open sourcing C# and Swift, giving away copies of Visual Studio to businesses less than one million dollars, and now buying Xamarin and open sourcing its cross-platform mobile development product.
The community rallying around Free Pascal might be a better option. Or maybe moving to RemObjects’ products? I don’t know.
Codegear was purchased for approximately 30 million dollars. Let’s be enormously charitable and say it doubled in value to 60 million. Embarcadero sold for about 600 million dollars to a company at least as large. So Delphi was only 10% of Codegear’s revenue stream (significantly lower than when at Borland for most of its life) max. Now if the combined company is worth 1.2 billion, that makes Delphi only a 5% contributor to the bottom line. Idera itself is being held by an investment group looking to sell it in the future. That means that at some point Delphi could only become 2% of a combined company’s portfolio. The more these mergers happen, the more likely it is that the buyer isn’t going to want to be bothered keeping the product. It’s also highly unlikely anyone else would want to buy it. There’s a steady risk that Delphi could just disappear one day (a reason most of the world moved on to languages with open source implementations). It’s long past time for community members to have a “plan B”.
If Idera’s shutting down the R&D wing, that’s a strong indication they intend to run Delphi as a mature product to “milk” rather than invest any more cash into it and try to grow it.
Rodrigo Farias Rezino said
Sad, but I agree. It’s business man. They don’t love coding in Delphi… don’t let you passion make you blind.
aplikmuj said
At the moment there are some ‘great’ opportunities in the DB Tools business. Sounds odd but there is a market share to make.
I can definitely confirm that Quest a long time ago started to move away from development tools and started to focus on administrative stuff. You are not wrong from that perspective. Also in DB Tools business tools are maybe bought for one job maybe a few times repeated. There a few features that make the Toad and usually it’s not people what developers would expect. If you don’t ALT+ENTER when executing SQL-Code it will become hard to convince a TOAD user and the existing script have to work too. Both arguments have never been the driving decision when purchasing a tool. Once the coding facilities were in the focus maybe today it’s the quick test for problems and the hard work put into this feature (a query that finds the problem of a database almost not responding will not return) or migrating schemas or monitoring.
Wondering in how far an IDE is a tool from that perspective. The tool perspective moved also into the application, frameworks or system architecture.
Tools do make sense when time is short but assuming a ‘shorter time’ because of a tool is not wise. Programming does not happen via clicking a button and hoping for the better.
I would consider a similar number of developers but buying/upgrading/SA every year in case of RAD Studio. Honestly. Most of the existing software simply does exist and has to be maintained. Do you think an insurance trust does run ASP.net application using one form for 130 entry fields :). Most of the people don’t know how to use Windows in an effective way. I have seen ladies in the U.S. that hammered on the keyboard and worked so effective with shortcuts.
You have point in general. The wish for a compiler supplied with the OS is one that never went away. Later the demand for a simple IDE (development facility) out of the box grew from this too.
We should not assume that there are millions of developers as powerful and flexible as Joseph Mitzen in this world. Free of course ‘does away with the need’ to convince those who would substitute. The idea behind is simply about growing beyond the appropriate market share in a liberal sense. We cannot simply argue and say, ‘Since we have boxed apple juice in the super market no one ever will buy apple juice from the farmer/farm shop’.
The free is simply about the assumption in the new economy that creating a monopoly is the best idea. The draw back is simply that you get a false sense of the profit of the deal. The customer of course will not complain about the seemingly bigger profit due to the lower price and those who don’t substitute will maybe be happy with their decision.
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