Missing The Old Forums

[CB2021 2]

I would like to read about other users experience upgrading to CB 11 but there is very little without the Embarcadero forums. These are the times I really miss the old Embarcadero forums.  Judging the feedback from Delphi users the upgrade is going very well.  

[Martin Sedgewick 30]

Off Topic FLAME WARS are much missed 😄

[Joseph MItzen 251]

2 hours ago, Martin Sedgewick said:

Off Topic FLAME WARS are much missed 😄

A few weeks ago I was thinking to myself... boy, do I miss Rudy Velthuis. There's so much I wish I could talk with him about. Then I did some googling and found some archived discussions.

 

I found Rudy and the old, evil version of Nick Hodges arguing that it would be of no benefit at all for Embarcadero to allow users to submit code fixes, also insisting that the Delphi test cases were vast and robust. I was there too, pointing out how useful user-submitted patches have been to open source software, citing the Linux kernel. Then Rudy replied to me that if he had his way, even the Linux kernel wouldn't be allowed to accept code submissions.

 

I drew a few conclusions:

1. Do I still miss Rudy? YES.
2. Was Rudy a very wise and intelligent person to converse with? Yes.
3. Did I enjoy discussing things with Rudy? Yes.
4. Did I enjoy discussing things with Rudy when he got like that? No.
5. It was the toxic environment in the forums that brought people to bombast, rhetoric, refusal to concede points, personal attacks, etc.
6. Do I miss the old forum? NO.

Here people can discuss things intelligently without getting nasty or defending a lost cause to the point of being ridiculous. I mean, here we talk about type inference... back on the old forum, I brought up the subject as one of the must-have features for Delphi as soon as possible and one person insisted that type inference was, and I quote, "just the compiler guessing". He continued to insist this after I explained the Handley-Millner Type Inference Algorithm to him, along with its mathematical guarantee of correctness. Then he declared that "a compiler should only do one thing" and type inference would be two things, so it shouldn't be part of the compiler. Another poster went on and on about rejecting modern features in Delphi. Someone asked how they felt about the Delphi string type and they replied that they don't use it where possible, only PChars (!!!). Even Rudy had to concede that this was detrimental and extreme. So... many... weird... conversations there. This place is so much more... sane... in comparison.

 

[Gord P 14]

I think the OP was referring to having C++ Builder discussions not the forum in general.  And I agree with him and for the reason he cited as well.  That is, there has just been a major release for C++Builder and there is absolutely zero discussion on it.  Very sad.  I have not installed it, so I can't comment on it.

[Anders Melander 1783]

4 hours ago, Joseph MItzen said:

A few weeks ago I was thinking to myself... boy, do I miss Rudy Velthuis.

I too miss Rudy, but to be honest he was also the main reason I stopped participating in the old fora; So many interesting topics deteriorated into endless yes, no, yes, no, discussions. That and the misuse of moderation power that were going on killed my interest.

[Joseph MItzen 251]

19 minutes ago, Gord P said:

I think the OP was referring to having C++ Builder discussions not the forum in general.  And I agree with him and for the reason he cited as well.  That is, there has just been a major release for C++Builder and there is absolutely zero discussion on it.  Very sad.  I have not installed it, so I can't comment on it.

So where did the C++Builder users who posted on the old forum go?

[FredS 138]

55 minutes ago, Joseph MItzen said:

C++Builder users

They most likely have justified abandonment issues..

[Roger Cigol 103]

Well I'm a C++ MVP and active C++ user and I check this forum from time to time. If I can I do make the odd (hopefully) helpful comment. I also check Stack Overflow for questions tagged C++ Builder. Stack Overflow is a good place to post if you have a specific question.  Here is the best place I can find for somewhat more imprecise (but still civilised and helpful) discussions.

I too miss the old Embarcadero forums. I pushed as hard as I could to get Embarcadero to keep them. They were getting lots of public viewable negative feedback about some of their releases. I feel they should have used this as a low cost way of learning what they needed to concentrate on improving. But it seems that rather than fixing the problems that were annoying their customers their marketing dept. insisted that they close the mechanism of reporting down.  They do have good products and they do have a good marketing team - but they do need to make sure that they listen to their customers and respond effectively to what they are not doing well. By closing their forum they lost an opportunity to do this.....

[Remy Lebeau 1394]

18 hours ago, Joseph MItzen said:

So where did the C++Builder users who posted on the old forum go?

♫ Into the Unknooo-ooo-ooo-own... ♫ (sorry, couldn't help myself )

[Joseph MItzen 251]

1 hour ago, Remy Lebeau said:

♫ Into the Unknooo-ooo-ooo-own... ♫ (sorry, couldn't help myself )

I've been thinking about it, and since C++ isn't exactly an obscure language, maybe they've gone to the same place non-C++ Builder C++ users go to.

[Joseph MItzen 251]

8 hours ago, Roger Cigol said:

I feel they should have used this as a low cost way of learning what they needed to concentrate on improving. But it seems that rather than fixing the problems that were annoying their customers their marketing dept. insisted that they close the mechanism of reporting down.  They do have good products and they do have a good marketing team - but they do need to make sure that they listen to their customers and respond effectively to what they are not doing well. By closing their forum they lost an opportunity to do this.....

I won't go into the whole story, but I once had an online exchange with David Intersimone, then VP of Developer Relations, about a survey he'd run and tried to explain to him how it was only going to tell him what he wanted to hear and not what he needed to know. Despite my being a professional data analyst at the time, it felt like he was trying to lecture me on how surveys worked. I tried to explain that when you survey the first 500 people to buy a new release, you're missing those who chose not to upgrade because of bugs, price or features, which were the three biggest complaints at the time (still are). Of course, it also missed those who had already opted to leave for another platform. That's when David gave me insight into the thought processes at Embarcadero and I knew there was no helping them... he wrote "People leave Delphi for C#; people leave C# for Delphi; so we just keep on doing what we're doing." In short, they're like a black box whose outputs are not influenced by the inputs.

 

This survey asked questions like (approximately) "What's the most awesome thing you can think of about Delphi?" and nothing about what's your biggest problem with it. Answers to this question (from the biggest fans who were quickest to order the upgrade) were used within days by the marketing team in a press release and a blog entry, showing the survey was nothing more than quote mining for marketing. Marco Cantu tried to claim that they have lots of surveys - dozens, hundreds, thousands! - where they ask all the questions I suggested and more, although no one seems to have ever received an invitation to take one of these alleged surveys.

 

In another instance a person talked about being a subject domain expert but no Delphi experience who was hired by a Delphi shop. They took him to... he called it a user group meeting, but it sounded like one of the old World Tour events. I'll skip over his general impressions, but he was unsettled by the small number and age of the participants. He brought this up after the meeting with the Embarcadero employee who was there and said that the employee responded to him: "We don't like for new people to show up at these meetings; they're filled with angry middle-aged white men".

 

I've got a few more examples I won't go into, but I'll say I've seen and heard enough to be convinced that for the *majority* of Embarcadero employees, the concerns of customers aren't really high on their agenda (David Millington being a notable exception). When two of the people who actually develop Delphi showed up in the old forums one day and someone brought up a critical bug they were experiencing and not getting help with, one of them wrote: "See - this is why we don't like to come here." Tony de la Llama, who was in sales, showed up in the forums once and he was a nice, friendly guy. When someone told him about a problem they were having, he expressed personal sorrow over their experience and promised to escalate the issue personally so they'd get a fix. He said we were all swell people and he really enjoyed interacting with the users and planned on doing it again. Days later the EMBT CEO blamed Tony personally for low Delphi sales (I was told this by another EMBT employee) and fired him right before Christmas. 😞

 

So anyway, they did not have a history of listening to their customers, rarely showed up in the forum and when they did it often didn't go well. And the one person who really listened got fired. Hence I don't think it's that great a loss. (Again, I want to give David Millington credit for being one of the few EMBT employees to visit forums, including Reddit, and actually offer help to users with problems and listen to their suggestions and feedback. He's the only one I've seen do so since Mr. de la Llama.)

 

[Roger Cigol 103]

A very interesting perspective from Joseph. I wonder how this can be changed..... Listening (and responding) to customers is one of the key reasons I am still in business.

[Sherlock 663]

2 hours ago, Roger Cigol said:

A very interesting perspective from Joseph. I wonder how this can be changed..... Listening (and responding) to customers is one of the key reasons I am still in business.

Oh, that's easy...decrease sales to a noticeable amount. But old timey companies with the "we do everything right" attitude owned by new timey "generate revenue or bust" corporations would die over that in an instant. So everything should go on the way it has always gone... move on, nothing to see here.

[Bill Meyer 337]

As many of us are likely to recall from the old forums, a key perspective here is that "developers don't understand marketing."

 

In order to consider making changes, one must first be open to the possibility that the current state of affairs could be improved.