UPDATED June 14 2007 (check update further down)!

The last days another riot have happened in the CodeGear non-tech newsgroup. Yet again!

The relationship between a vendor and a consumer should be healthy. The vendor make decisions thats supposed to be for the benefit of the majority of its consumers and other potential consumers not yet in the fold. Sometimes those decisions are annoying some consumers or even hurting them to some extent. Hence the consumer ofcourse will need to voice his or hers opinion on whats going on and that its hurting the consumer. Thats a natural right in an open society with freedom of speech etc.

However there is a fine line between expressing ones opinions and terrorising the community. Disgruntled consumers are almost as dangerous as disgruntled employees... they can make alot of harm. The difference is imo however that the consumer often still have things at stake... existing codebases etc. and essentially often would have liked CodeGear to be successful of the simple reason that then the chance of the consumer to be successful with the current codebase is higher.

Hence its completely incomprehensible to me that all the so called Delphi lovers are so busy as they are damaging CodeGear by diminishing Delphi. Sure Delphi has had its rough edges in the D8 and D2005 releases, but the issues have been dealt with by CodeGear who obviously are aware about the problems and knows its in their interest to get those issues solved. Hence D2007 and Update 1.

Im personally quite annoyed about the way the critisism is expressed. Why do I care? Because I am a consumer of CodeGear products, and the company I work in is producing products consumed by thousands of CodeGear consumers too. Hence what damages CodeGear sales directly damages us and our customers. And I simply wont accept that, regardless of that Im in agreement with some of the elements that have been expressed by others regarding what would be good to have in a CodeGear roadmap like Linux/Cross compilation support etc.

The constant negative aura around CodeGear's non-tech group says to me that CodeGear is better of shutting it down permanently. Although sometimes being entertaining to read, its surely not doing CodeGear or its customers any good.

The article I wrote about a year ago 'The story of 3rdparty announcements and reactions on them' which is still available on our website at:

http://www.components4programmers.com/articles/thestoryof3rdpartyannouncementsa.htm

can be directly applied to whats going on between CodeGear as the vendor and its consumers.

UPDATE June 14 2007:

The responses I get on this blog entry, both as comments here and on the CodeGear nontech newsgroups, makes me realize that people dont seem to understand the effect that extremely negative posts in vast amounts can have. Its a misconception that just because its on a non-tech newsgroup, only the geeks will read it. WRONG. The non-tech newsgroup is being cached into several web based search machines, including Google Groups. Try to search for CodeGear and order the search by date.... the top 6 entries are all providing the probing potential new customer with a negative view on everything related to CodeGear.

Some people may be smart enough to read thru the bulls..t, but managers arent always that smart and as they may already be biased away from CodeGear, this number of negative posts will just be the final proof they need to convince their bosses that... "dont go the CG way... Ive read comments from their customers... and they dont believe in CG or its products... too risky to go there".

I welcome constructive discussions about features and techniques... but please.... grow up and dont act like a child when things dont go your way! As CodeGear have multiple times said.... single customers cant possible have any idea about why CodeGear make their business decisions the way they do, so continuing to whine about it wont do any good, on the contrare. No doubt that every community served by CodeGear, that being Delphi developers, C++ developers, PHP developers, Java developers etc. wants to feel that CodeGear takes special good care about them. However try to look at your own company... how does that operate? Are you able to provide specially good care for all your customers at once?... specially if the demanding ones are numerous? and very vocal? No.. .you will have to prioritize... and so does CodeGear.

Help yourself by helping CodeGear in the right way! Give them input but dont expect them to jump according to your tune as thats not how a company behaves. It receives the input, estimates the ups and downs of implementing the idea and then either accept, reject or postpone the idea. If you think you can do that better than CodeGear and being more economically successful than CodeGear, then you have an option for starting your own company. Do that... spend time on that... and realize how the world suddenly seems different when the problems and tough decisions start to pile up.

Kim