Good Luck to CodeGear

A couple of days ago, David I, Anders O and Christine Ellis were nice enough to touch base with me to briefly discuss the news most of our Delphi/C++Builder customers already know...that Borland sold it's CodeGear division to Embarcadero.

Here's hoping that the new chapter in the product line that gave birth to DevExpress in Nov 1998, is an exciting one.

For those customers who've been writing to us asking about what the future might hold...my crystal ball just got a major tune up and I know how all of this will end up. I'm more than happy to share the information for the right fee.

On a more serious note...our product plans for Delphi/C++Builder will remain the same regardless of ownership of said products. As I mentioned to David I - what matters to us is not who owns the products but whether we are forced to compete with the component palette inside Delphi/C++Builder.

On a personal note...announcements like this always trigger the proverbial "walks down memory lane" for me. When I heard the news from Vlad in the morning my mind was instantly taken back to July 1999 and BorCon in Philadelphia. It was about 8 months since the launch of our first product for Delphi - the ExpressGrid. We had decided to make a big splash...do a major sponsorship of the event. We'd hired an outfit to build our very very large booth and ship it from the West coast to the East Coast. Tom flew out to Philly in advance to make sure all went well. When I arrived, Tom said to me - you don't want to know what's going on. Not a patient person in my younger age...I told him to freakin' tell me what was going on...He replied that the booth was not in Philly and that the on-site rep from the folks building the booth had no idea where it was.

An hour of angry shouting later we learned that they had not shipped the booth in time and that only 1 day earlier they were forced to ship the massive (I really mean massive) wood/particle board structure via air cargo to Philly. To make a very long and expletive laden story short, the booth arrived and the union crew put it together just in time for the opening day.

BorCon Philly was also the event where we first met a few DevExpress team members...Julian (who was with TurboPower at the time), Mark (who was constantly followed by about a half dozen groupies), and Azret (who was in love with our products and ready to conquer the world with an app he was building).

Over the years, our business relationship with Inprise/Borland/CodeGear has given me plenty of ulcers...but the fact is that were it not for Delphi we'd not exist today. Good luck guys....here's hoping it all works out for the best.

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