Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Scotts Valley, California

Latest close encounter  VSLive Borland Booth  San Francisco March 24, 2004

After his VSLive keynote speech, Bill Gates stopped by the Borland booth at the VSLive! Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday March 24, 2004. I spent a few minutes bringing Bill up to date on what Borland has done to support Microsoft in the past year. Alison Deane (VP Marketing) also talked to Bill about our marketing efforts, and Mike Bartzel (Business Alliances Manager) reminded him how Microsoft and Borland teams are working closer together than we ever have in the 20+ years we have supported each other.

Eight Borland products for .NET and Visual Studio in the past year

During my conversation, I told Bill that in the past year alone, Borland has shipped eight products supporting .NET in the past year, six of those products also have integrations into Visual Studio. Bill said he didn't realize that Borland had done so much to support .NET.

I also gave Bill a quick tour through the ALM solution that Borland delivers for Windows with CaliberRM (Define), Together Edition for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET (Design), C#Builder for the Microsoft .NET Framework and Delphi 8 for the Microsoft .NET Framework (Develop), Optimizeit Profiler for the Microsoft .NET Framework (Test), Janeva and Interbase (Deploy), and StarTeam (Manage). I mentioned how easy weve allowed our millions of Delphi developers to move their applications to .NET (most applications can be migrated by a recompile using VCL for .NET).

Modeling, Modeling, Modeling

When I mentioned the modeling part of the Borland ALM solution, Bill got really interested. Bill asked me if we were going for a value play or a mass market push. Borland business development manager Michael Bartzel told him we were focused on bringing modeling to the mass market with a price of $199 for Together for Visual Studio! Bill really liked the price point and said "maybe we should license it". In a recent e-Week interview titled, "What is Bill Gates Thinking?", Bill said "Modeling is the future, so every company that's working on this I think it's great, and I think there are some real contributions that can be made."

At the end of the booth conversation we also had a few additional seconds to talk about Philippe Kahn, the past, and Borland's support of Microsoft for more than 20 years. Then Bill was whisked away to continue his busy schedule.

My first close encounter with Bill

Before I joined Borland in June of 1985, I was the Director of Software Evaluation, Support and Training for Softsel Computer Products in LA. Sometime (frankly I dont actually remember the date, but Microsoft was still located in Bellevue and it was well before the announcement of Windows v1.0). in the early 1980s Softsel founders Bob Leff and David Wagment, and I went north to see an early version of Windows 1. Bill Gates welcomed us to Microsoft and gave a quick overview of a product to be called Microsoft Windows. One of the product managers gave a demo while Bill sat and watched. The demo focused on multiple applications running and an algorithm MS had to find the largest open space on the screen to launch a new application. The early version of Windows was tiled and did not support overlapping windows. I was so full of myself at the time so I asked them why they called it Windows when it was tiled? Bill excitedly spoke up saying that each of the applications was running in a window, these are Windows!. The co-founders of Softsel looked at me and told me to be nice.

Other close encounters with Bill

Comdex Fall 1986 Turbo Basic v1.0 launch and the Borland party  Turbo Basic v1.0 blew the socks off Quick Basic 2.0. Turbo Basic generated compiled code that ran many many times faster than Quick Basics interpreted code. Turbo Basic also had numerous extensions to the language and runtime library. Turbo Basic, developed by Bob Zale, still exists in the form of PowerBasic. I spent all day with Philippe Kahn in press meetings and also in the Borland Comdex booth. Borland hosted a Comdex party at the MGM Grand Ballroom that was so overcrowded with people that employees had to block the entrance so that the party would not be shut down by the fire marshall. Our team did let Bill into the party. I vaguely remember Bill coming over to me and asked me why Turbo Basic was so good. Now you must know that I had not had time to eat much all day and I was having a few adult beverages (too many to be exact) to celebrate the successful announcement of Turbo Basic. All I can remember saying to Bill, in response to his question, was something incoherent like "because its better". Later that night, I had to be helped to my hotel room, waking up the next morning to realize that I had lost my wallet the night before.

Comdex 1993 Bill Gates in the Borland booth  We were demoing the superior Borland C++ compiler in our Comdex booth. I was roaming around the show floor video taping other booths and the excitement and craziness of the show. A Borlander came running up to me saying Bill Gates was in our booth. I ran back to the booth just in time to video tape Bill (from behind) watching the Borland C++ theater demonstration. I walked around to his front to capture him looking at the presentation. He turned to see me video taping him and then asked one of the Microsoft PR people to come over to ask me to stop taping, which I did. That video clip became part of one of my infamous Borland Conference videos - "Bill Meets Godzilla".

Windows 95 launch on the Redmond Campus  Borland had a booth in a tent on the Microsoft campus. Brad Silverberg (ex-VP of R&D at Borland) launched Windows 95 on the main stage. Bill was there as well. Philippe Kahn was demonstrating Sidekick for Windows 95 right next to the Borland area where I was demoing. That was so much fun  all of us together in one spot in Redmond.

High Bandwidth / High Information Interchange

I know that Bill really likes a high bandwidth technical and informational interchange so I kept it at that (with a few seconds of reminiscing about Philippe and the early years). It was fun to talk with him face to face about technology and products, something I had not done since my earlier years at Borland.

Bill  thanks for stopping by the Borland VSLive booth and thanks for 20 years of cooperation with Borland.

On Tuesday evening at the VSLive conference Visual Studio Magazine presented its Readers Choice Awards. C#Builder for the Microsoft .NET Framework won the award in the Development Tools category. The award was on display in the Borland booth when Bill was there.

Borland - Excellence Endures

David Intersimone
Vice President, Developer Relations and Chief Evangelist
Borland Software Corporation
davidi@borland.com