A while ago @LarsFosdal praised Bruneau Babet for trying to offset the lack of Idera/EMBT customer communication and quality control: Lars Fosdal is right
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/05/17
Earlier this year, [Wayback/Archive] Lars Fosdal posted a long thread about Embarcadero/IDERA software quality and one special person trying to offset the lack.
It is important not just because of his opinion, but also because Lars posts rarely about his Delphi opinion. He is the kind of guy quietly working with Delphi and doing a lot of community support.
When he posts, it is important and should be a signal to be picked up by Embarcadero/IDERA. Until now, not so much of that.
The first tweet was this:
Bruneau Babet is the best developer advocate that Embarcadero can have! The man inexhaustibly and tirelessly deals with all our pesky questions and comes back with detailed, sensible, and HONEST answers.
@EmbarcaderoTech and @marcocantu should hire more people like Bruneau.
and the last tweet ended with this:
Idera/EMBT – please work on your customer communication and quality control – while you still have customers.
This reflects what I see in the Delphi and C++ Builder Community: a declining number of long-term customers where the rate of decline is only limited by the amount of effort of moving away.
This might be offset by the inflow of temporary new customers but overall it weakens the community at an increasing velocity.
So I asked if I could quote the tweet series in full and was allowed to.
[Wayback/Archive] Thread by @LarsFosdal on Thread Reader App with these individual tweets:
[Wayback/Archive] Bruneau Babet is the best developer advocate that Embarcadero can have! The man inexhaustibly and tirelessly deals with all our pesky questions and comes back with detailed, sensible, and HONEST answers. @EmbarcaderoTech and @marcocantu should hire more people like Bruneau. 1/
- [Wayback/Archive] Why is this important? I’ve been using Delphi since its inception and have been using it lovingly. But – all is not well in the state of Delphi. Releases are marketing driven, the quality is variable, and important improvements keep getting pushed back. 2/
- [Wayback/Archive] One of the factors that really stand out, is the lack of communication. Since the release of 11, a couple of particularly useful and popular plugins have been nowhere to see. There have been hints that they are delayed, but no explanations or announcements of schedules. 3/
- [Wayback/Archive] The primary documentation site has been fully or partially out of order for weeks and is only recently restored for the latest version only. No announcements of why, nor updates on the progress of restoring it. 4/
- [Wayback/Archive] The worst thing a company can do is fail to inform and communicate to its loyal customers. It erodes trust and loyalty, and people will lose their patience with the secondary problem – product flaws. And – Delphi is currently flawed in numerous ways. 5/
- [Wayback/Archive] For me – two issues really dwarf the others. 1. The HighDPI support. It still is borked so badly that having multiple developers with different DPI / Scaling settings on the same UI project is all about cleaning up broken layouts. It stops our team from upgrading to HighDPI. 6/
- [Wayback/Archive] 2. The debuggers are unstable, unreliable and in some situations next to unusable. Breakpoints suddenly stop working, ghost breakpoints appear where you have set none, the app being debugged freezes, inspecting data can illogically fail, or the whole thing just crashes out. 7/
- [Wayback/Archive] 32-bit single thread debugging is about the only thing that works most of the time. Go 64-bit or multithreaded and you will be dealing with blood pressure raising issues. I could go on ranting about the other issues, but have a look at
quality.embarcadero.cominstead. 8/- [Wayback/Archive] So, why is it like this? The acquisition by Idera added another series of terminations. EMBT has been repeatedly “optimized” for profit but guess what – it is being economized into poverty. A smaller team is not necessarily a bad thing, but without realistic schedules, … 9/
- [Wayback/Archive] … good communication with the customers, as well as extraordinary quality control – the users will less and less appreciate the efforts of the smaller team. Idera/EMBT – please work on your customer communication and quality control – while you still have customers. 10/10
Some related tweets:
- [Wayback/Archive] Fred Ahrens on Twitter: “@LarsFosdal @EmbarcaderoTech @marcocantu They are simply not aware of that this lack of communication is an enormous source for speculation – and not in a good way. And they have no idea how glad the community would be to help and get involved with solving the problems. @EmbarcaderoTech marketing is not communication.”
- This is true: over the last 25 years, especially after the Delphi 5 era, numerous people tried to offer help and ran into brick walls.
- [Wayback/Archive] David Millington on Twitter: “@LarsFosdal @EmbarcaderoTech @marcocantu Bruneau is amazing. I count myself very lucky to work with him and hold a lot of respect for him.”
- That was the only Embarcadero employee responding at all.
- [Wayback/Archive] karim kouni on Twitter: “@LarsFosdal indeed. 11 was a complete disaster on high dpi support. 11.1 seems to be better on paper.”
- Note that with the new version numbering it means 11.1 is to 11 as what 10.0.1 was to 10.0, see:
- [Wayback/Archive] Glenn Dufke on Twitter: “@jpluimers 11.1 is a point release so the compiler version hasn’t changed (v35) however improvements to the compiler and areas that affects the LSP server have gone into the release”
- [Wayback/Wayback] ideasawakened 💡 on Twitter: “@jpluimers @B1tSmurf RAD Studio 11.1 is a full release, such as 10.4.1 and 10.4.2 were full releases that were followed by smaller updates/hotfixes.”
- Note that with the new version numbering it means 11.1 is to 11 as what 10.0.1 was to 10.0, see:
- [Wayback/Archive] Dalija Prasnikar on Twitter: “+1000 Bruneau is a treasure.”
Related blog posts:
- Do NOT download the Embarcadero patch for RAD Studio 10.2.2!
- The Delphi documentation site docwiki.embarcadero.com has been down/up oscillating for 4 days is now down for almost a day.
- Which got solved by “ditching” all wiki documentation for older Delphi versions loosing truckloads of information (like release notes and differences between various Delphi versions)
Oh: posted today as a tribute to Nasjonaldag (Lars is Norwegian).
–jeroen
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