Delphi is not for PHP... Feb 20, 2007 19:14
Today CodeGear announced two new products: "Delphi 2007 for Win32" and "Delphi for PHP". I won't comment about Delphi 2007 (just yet), but I will say a few words about "Delphi for PHP".
It's a horrible product name. There's nothing "Delphi" about it; there is no technical basis to justify the "Delphi" moniker at all. It's all PHP and doesn't use the BDS IDE core. That's great for a PHP product, but what does Delphi have to do with it? They could have called it PHInterbase or "Interbase for PHP"; at least they actually ship Interbase with the product. It seems to me this is exactly a marketing practice they should avoid: line extension. I'm a big fan of the 22 immutable laws of marketing; CodeGear should be too.
The "Everything you love about Delphi" slogan is silly too. Does the product support the Delphi language? No. Does the product create high performance natively compiled/nice looking GUI applications for Win32? No. So what is this "everything" that I supposedly love about Delphi? A drag-drop designer? Oh right, how silly of me, PHP is what I love about Delphi! At best it's factually incorrect, at worst it's insulting.
So who are they marketing this product to? One theory: existing Delphi developers. Considering the name of the product and slogan, that's the most reasonable answer. Is that a big (enough) market? If CodeGear has plans on rolling their PHP support into BDS, will the upsell margins be that significant? The whole marketing strategy seems foolish to me. The larger PHP market is much bigger than the existing Delphi one, go after that market.
The only thing I can think of to explain this strategy is that CodeGear wants to push two brands going forward: "Delphi" and "VCL". But again, I point to the law of line extension. What happened to using "Turbo" as a brand? Based on what the product actually is, I believe "Turbo PHP" would have worked quite well. The price point is right, the whole "single language IDE" thing is right. I just don't get it.
Ok, so what is the actual product? "Delphi for PHP" is Qadram's qstudio. CodeGear apparently cut a deal with Qadram to repackage their forthcoming PHP product. I'm glad CodeGear is acquiring and/or licensing outside technology. But the ultimate test is if "Delphi for PHP" can compete against the other php offerings: Komodo, Zend Studio, PhpED or VS.PHP. At the end of the day, it appears the distinguishing feature CodeGear has is a visual designer and I'm not sure if it's enough.
Write a comment
- Required fields are marked with *.