Open Discussion Thread for "Stunted Growth: Subsidies and Stagnation in the Software Tools Market," by Steve Benz

Interesting article Steve, but I think you sort of blow your credibility when you, as a maker of a small development tool say,

"The best way to do that would be to have the platform vendors provide guaranteed loans and outright cash grants to individual developers and small shops that want to produce a software development tool targeted at their platform."

Great send up though!

This is one of the better arguments I've read against the free software movement. Unlike the previous commenter, I don't see much of a problem with the fact that Benz runs an ISV. I think it actually helps cement the point. People are so up on all the promise and portent of open-source that they forget that it means the death of a revenue stream for the industry. That's right -- it's an industry, not a charity.
Open-source, in so many ways, is a car crash we're all being forced to look at and say "yes, how lovely". I can fully agree with the notion that information wants to be free. But here's the rub: if it IS free, so are our services as developers, as well as those of innumerable content providers dependent on selling their ideas for income. I'm a developer and a musician, and as such I don't have much love for open-source, for Bit Torrent, etc. etc. Yes, it's pure magic as far as technology goes. But it's pure hell for trying to make a living in this field.
But it seems that most people can't make that connection.
BTW - as you may or may not know, whatever you've got going on over at Sourceforge doesn't mean jack when it's job hunting time.

But with respect to the overarching idea of stagnation in software dev productivity, I'm not sold that it's the ISVs who are going to save us. The brick wall we've hit is partly economic (as described in the article) but it's just as much technological. Software is, for all intents and purposes, as dumb as it was 10, 20, 30 years ago. Tart up the languages and tools all you want, it's all still GIGO.
Certainly the elements touched on in the article are part of the big picture, but I suspect an even bigger part is a failure of imagination.

A few years ago, Delphi used to cost 5 to 10 times as much as Visual Basic. It was much better, but.. tell that to the business people. :(

"You can't get yourself fired if you buy from Microsoft"

The problem is that business people, and not hackers, are usually in charge.

There is also this problem with Open Source Software. I can't understand: is software development a hobby, something to do in the spare time, or is it also a job?

For me, it is both. This is why I don't contribute to open source. I don't want to lower the wages of other programmers.

It seems that the software developers have little business sense. They work for free a lot, in the hope that they will "damage Microsoft". Yes they do.. but they hurt their fellow programmers the most! They also work for free for mega-corps like IBM and Sun who take OSS and add it to their service offerings.. for free, without any programmer getting paid!

This headline from the Borland web site is quite topical given Steve's "Stunted Growth" article:

Borland to Acquire Software Quality Company, Segue Software; Announces Plan to Divest IDE Product Lines

In abandoning its developer products and moving exclusively to "lifecycle tools" Borland is moving closer to what Steve Benz calls the "top of the market."

This quote from Borland's press release also has an intersting synergy with Steve's article:

While organizations look to ALM solutions to improve team and organizational productivity, individual developers continue to demand more feature-rich tools that will help improve their own productivity. With this in mind, and the knowledge that developers play a pivotal role in the application lifecycle, Borland has continued to invest in its industry-leading development tools business in parallel with its ALM investments.

Larry O'Brien also blogged about this Borland news today:

...my god, the end of Turbo? This really feels like the passing of an era to me. Of course, Borland has been eclipsed (hah!) in every aspect, but Borland was such a huge part of my nascent programming / software development life and the C/C++ wars of the late 80s and early 90s so dominated my formative years in the tech magazines....

Dan

Kevin Yank at SitePoint blogs on Borland's JBuilder IDE:

As a longtime JBuilder user, I always enjoyed the product's rich feature set. It always seemed like if it was worth doing, JBuilder could do it. It wouldn't always be easy or attractive, but you could do it. Borland recently released JBuilder 2006, the twelfth major release of the IDE, where the major changes (aside from supporting new standards and technologies) were in the area of team development: with the new version, two developers can work together on a piece of code, each from his or her own desktop. The IDE provides tools for the developers to chat and give/take control over a shared code view.

But as JBuilder has evolved over the past few years, I’ve observed more and more focus on producing new "peripheral" features like these, while the core experience of day-to-day coding has remained relatively unchanged. As its innovative competitors have deployed rich coding assistance tools (such as static analysis of source code in IDEA and continuous integration in Eclipse), JBuilder's efforts in these areas have seemed unpolished in some cases.

Here again we see the migration from developer-productivity-orientation to team- and lifecyle-orientation, which I interpret as more evidence that Borland sees (and has for some time) more money in the "top of market," team-oriented, automated lifecycle management features--which is now apparently going to be the focus of the company. Are we to conclude that there's no money in developer productivity? Or is this merely Borland doing it's best to fight the economic forces Steve describes in "Stunted Growth"?

Dan