Orcas is Part of the Delphi Family

So I wanted to look up something on Oracs, the as yet unreleased development tool from Microsoft for Vista. So I went to Firefox and typed Orcas into the Google search box. The first hit that came up was on Wikipedia and it turned out to be on Orca (the singular of Orcas). I actually learned a lot.

I knew Orca where killer whales, and I knew they were related to dolphins. What surprised me was that dolphins and killer whales are both in the Delphinidae family. I thought that was really revealing that Microsoft choose that as the code name for their product, especially now that they are playing catch up with Delphi again. In case you didn't know, CodeGear (FKA Borland) now has two IDE's (Delphi 2007 and C++ Builder 2007) released that support Microsoft's Windows Vista, while Microsoft doesn't have one released yet.

Now someone pointed out that you can use .NET 3.0 with Visual Studio 2005 to get some Vista support, but from my understanding you still don't get Sheet of Glass support on your forms, or some of the other neato Aero effects without writing extra code. And to be fair, CodeGear's 2007 releases don't support .NET 3.0 or much of the specific functionality only exposed through .NET 3.0 - then again, it is a native Win32 development tool, so of course it doesn't support .NET.

The significant fact is that CodeGear has two actual releases for Vista before Microsoft does. There are a number of great innovations in Delphi 2007 that Microsoft is yet to copy.

In related news, CodeGear released their Delphi Roadmap, which shows plans for Highlander to be released this year with support for .NET 2.0 and compatibility with .NET 3.0.

It is nice to see Delphi out in front again.

Score: Development tool releases for Vista

• CodeGear: 2
• Microsoft: 0

Google Gears

Did you hear about Google Gears? It lets you use web based applications while you are offline. So you could use Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Apps. BTW, Gears is Open Source.

I noticed support for it in my Google Reader a while ago. I just read a news article about it. Firefox 3 has plans to support this as well. I read about it a while ago. They were waiting for some provider of web based applications to start supporting the idea, which now Google is doing.

The thing is, I don't see Microsoft supporting this kind of innovation since it competes with Office specifically, and Windows in general. That means no IE support for the latest web innovation. But with Microsoft's push for their Live products maybe they will support it. I guess we will see.

I still think we are within 5 years of seeing a very significant shift with Microsoft's position in the industry. The web and the web browser is becoming the platform Microsoft feared it would be. It is competing with the windows and office offering. Now with their move into patent litigation and Paul Graham's observations on their demise, I believe things have been set in motion. John Dvorak said they are going the way of the IBM years ago. He was especially vocal about it during the Lindows AKA Linspire fiasco.