Subject: Old PowerBuilder Facebook page deactivatedHi Everyone, Happy new year! As of today, the old PowerBuilder facebook page is deactivated. Please be sure to become a fan of PowerBuilder here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/PowerBuilder/160355699256 Go PB!!PowerBuilder Fan Page
Category: Powerbuilder
The following is MY perception of Sybase’s PowerBuilder:
Years ago PowerBuilder was king. No one could touch it. It was relatively inexpensive. Microsoft’s Visual Basic matured and the Pascal based Borland’s Delphi was released. Then it fell and fall it did.
Sybase
As it was falling from the throne Sybase purchased Powersoft, makers of PowerBuilder. As the the market share continued to shrink, PowerBuilder developers had more difficulty in finding new projects. Most new development was written in Visual Basic or Java.
Years went by with marketing of PowerBuilder little more than the occasional road show, TechWave presentations and the ISUG Technical Journal ads catered towards existing customers. Little to no effort was put forth by Sybase to gain new PowerBuilder customers.
During this week’s Sybase TechWave, PowerBuilder version 12 was released. It has all the whistles and kitchen sinks you could ask for. An amazing tool for development! Too bad no one outside of the die hard PowerBuilder programmers will use it.
Blasphemy! Heretic!
Consider this:
Sybase owns PowerBuilder. It owns the PowerBuilder software, PowerBuilder language, PowerScript, the PowerBuilder vm, and everything PowerBuilder.
No problem right?
What will happen to PowerBuilder when Sybase is bought out by another company? Products with tiny market share like PowerBuilder would likely be killed or in a state of limbo for several years. Anyone remember what happened when IBM bought Informix?
Do you really want to bet your career and business on a software development tool that is locked to a single smallish vendor?
Maybe, perhaps, if Sybase were to release the PowerBuilder 4GL language and PowerScript to the world like Microsoft did with the C# and Visual Basic languages and Sun with Java… Perhaps if Sybase would allow 3rd parties to develop tools based around the PowerBuilder language royalty free…
Sybase: PLEASE FREE THE POWERBUILDER 4GL LANGUAGE!
I mean, really, what benefit could Sybase have to cripple the PowerBuilder developers?
It’s coming…
48 hours from now something big is coming!
The ISUG Technical Journal Sep/Oct 2008 is out.
This issue contains:
- Sybase IQ and Sybase WorkSpace Part II By Mike Crocker
- Perl in the shell By Jason Froebe
- Taming the process nightmare: Consolidating a Horde of Process Diagrams with PowerDesigner By Mike Nicewarner
- Information overload: Weapons-grade data analysis comes of age By Teresa Foster
- Maximizing PowerBuilder and SQLAnywhere Part III SQLAnywhere, a PowerBuilder Developer’s perspective
By Chris Pollach - select random (stuff) from SYBASE Command shell by proxy By Bill Grant
- Mobile Enterprise Everywhere: Taking Sybase on the road By Adrian Bridgwater
- Sybase TechWave 2008: Time for the technology tsunami
You need to be an ISUG member to receive the ISUG Technical Journal. Join ISUG today!
International Sybase User Group
MyDatabases Volume 1 Issue 1 (July 2008)
Geek Spotlight: Michael Peppler
Sybase ASE on Ubuntu 8.04
Multicore Processors
VMware Virtualization
Logical Process Manager
