survey wrap up Apr 24, 2005 23:38
It's been a week since I put up the Delphi 2005 survey and I'd like to share my thoughts about it. First and foremost, I'd like to say "thank you" to all the participants; I really enjoyed watching the numbers over the last week.
For the purposes of discussion I took a snapshot of the numbers here. This is a static html page and should not change. I'm not closing the survey...I don't mind if more people want to take it.
A few things about the survey before I dive into my interpretation of the data:
- It's not a scientific survey; the numbers can easily be disputed.
- I was very pleased with the number (almost 250) and quality of the responses. It doesn't appear to me that there were many trolls or people trying to deliberately move the numbers in one direction or another. IMO, this is a tribute to the Delphi community.
Even though the survey was not scientific, I still believe it reveals some interesting things.
On the issues of IDE stability and responsiveness, I like to look at the 1-5 scale as school grades (1 = F; 5 = A). Delphi 2005 gets a C- in stability and a D+ in responsiveness. One may argue that we don't know if these evaluations were taken before or after a service pack was applied; this is a valid point, however as a general impression of the product I don't think it matters. Delphi 2005 has received marks that are below average.
The absolutely shocking thing revealed about Delphi 2005 is that well over half the survey respondents (59%) have had the IDE simply vanish. How this could happen? Did Borland QA know about this? If so, why did they release Delphi 2005? If not, do you think the current level of QA is sufficient? All these questions come to my mind. I don't claim to have any hard facts about the situation, but I cannot imagine any positive answers. IMO, something somewhere failed 59% of the respondents.
When you compare this with the marks Visual Studio.NET receives, it is also telling. VS.NET gets a solid B in stability and a B- in responsiveness. Although not as high as what the respondents value (B+ marks in stability/responsiveness), VS.NET does better than Delphi 2005. Surprising to me, Delphi 2005 isn't the only IDE that vanishes. 15% of VS.NET users have had it vanish as well. I have never had VS.NET vanish on me, however I trust that the respondents were honest and balanced (around a 3 in their attitude towards MS).
In my own experience, after applying SP2, I have never had Delphi 2005 vanish and, in general, the stability has been good. It's a positive sign that overall, the service packs have improved the quality of Delphi 2005 (3.55). The problem I have is that it has taken 4 months to have a product that is stable: Delphi 2005 was released mid-November 2004; SP2 was released mid-March 2005. IMO, Delphi 2005 was released too soon.
Delphi for .NET did very well in terms of it's viability on .NET (133 responses). I still think that Chrome is a better technical choice and would recommend it to any Delphi developer doing .NET development (57% are doing .NET work). Based on the 42 responses, I think Chrome has a great chance of carving out a niche for itself. C# seems to lead the way on .NET with 151 responses; which is what I would have expected.
The primary Delphi version and the upgrade question I think are very important for Borland to pay attention to. 55% are still using Delphi 7 as their primary Delphi development IDE. I have no idea if this has been the pattern after subsequent releases of Delphi. On one hand I can understand holding off on an upgrade: waiting for third party vendors to release their products, possible migration work of your existing code base...waiting until after the first/second service pack. On the other hand, if it's a good release, I suspect that most people will upgrade.
The upgrade question was suggested by one of the early survey participants. I added the question and then added the "depends" answer later. In retrospect I should have added two responses instead of "depends": "depends, probably" and "depends, not likely". Something to show which way people were leaning since I think "depends" is too easy of an answer to give and is too open to wide interpretation.
These two responses would be quite worrisome if it were my company; well I am a shareholder and a customer so they are worrisome. Here is a release that is slow to be adopted and whose subsequent release will be met with great skepticism. You can only milk your existing customer base for so long...2 releases is a long time; isn't that what CA is for? (:biggrin:) I'm actually somewhat optimistic that Borland did NOT make their numbers this quarter, perhaps feeling some heat is what's required to produce better products.
One last thing I must mention: It is funny to me that I didn't even think of putting Delphi 8 as ones primary IDE version and no one complained about it either. Delphi 8 was only mentioned once by a respondent and only to suggest asking about ugrade policies. I guess no one misses Delphi 8 or cares about it too much.
I'd like to gauge how useful/worthwhile this survey actually was....so please take another survey here!
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