Just trying to point out some misconceptions: At a recent meeting a Borland representative gave us some interesting information about what is going on. Apparently there were more than 40 interested parties in the "DevCo" tools (which include Delphi, C++, C#, JBuilder, ...) and in the past months these have been short listed to "a handful". So there is certainly no shortage of interest and it is expected that the ultimately lucky buyer/investor will be selected in "a couple of months". The Borland people who are staying with the DevCo products are all very positive about separating the dev tools from the ALM tools because it will allow them to focus much more on those tools (technically, financially and marketing-wise) than before and that should guarantee DevCo a better future than if it where still tied to the ALM stuff. And why would you create development tools that compete with Microsoft’s? You probably wouldn't ask if you had used them! Apart from a couple of misses tools like Delphi have been consistently better in many ways than the corresponding Microsoft tools. Many of the "exciting new features" in VS 2002/3/5 had already been around in Delphi for many years. Ever since Microsoft’s started working on .NET, much of its roadmap has looked like a Delphi (existing) feature list. And if you were wondering about what ALM means, just think Team System, but in mature products that been around for years now. Microsoft main claim to making "the best" development tools relies on bringing out another version of .NET at the same time so that they are the only ones offering support for the platform (at least for a while). But at the same time they immediately drop support for any previous versions of .NET (e.g. VS 2005 does not create .NET 1.1 apps), rather than showing any responsibility for and commitment to the stuff they did “last year”. Contrast this with Delphi which, although it hasn’t caught up with .NET 2 yet, at least supports both Win 32 and .NET 1.1 out of the same IDE, even to the extent that legacy Win32 source code can be compiled to NET 1.1 assemblies if you want to. VB6 programmers can feel free to start crying now … Alex