 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Borland International Retreat Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
 |
Many of you are familiar with the name Borland International: It was made famous by its founder Philippe Kahn, who released Turbo Pascal for US$49.95 back in 1983. That low price and high quality made the product available to millions. Today, some flue million registered users worldwide use Borland products such as Paradox, Quattro Pro, Turbo Pascal, C++, Sidekick, ObjectVision etc. Borland's mailing list system spits out 50 million labels in one session! The company's sales for the past year were $US226M - it is a listed company in the US and the UK. It has offices in Australia, France, UK, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Singapore, and Denmark. About 900 well-paid employees make up the world-wide staff: Software development is carried out by three separate "business units": Languages, Spreadsheet and Database.
Why the name "Borland"? No, there is no "Frank Borland", the mythical silent partner who lives in the hills - Philippe Kahn (a French national) just liked the name because it sounded American.
A Retreat
What is a retreat? Many US corporations hold all-expenses-paid events for user group officers, although the guests have to make their own way to the event. The guests are housed, fed and otherwise looked after; and sometimes given some souvenirs to take home. The company demonstrates its products and answers questions. Why should a company do this? At Comdex and other such events, a company can only manage to capture an audience for an hour or two at the most, and the audience might have their minds on something else. But why should a company bother spending so much money when it could simply mail out a few samples to magazine editors?
User Group Commitment
More and more US software and hardware companies are recognising the power of user groups and are employing full-time staff to deal exclusively with user groups. Borland employs two people, Tami Casey and Anne Quackenbush; other such companies are IBM, Intel, SPC, Sue, Aldus, Asymetrix, Corel, GeoWorks, Microsoft, WordPerfect, Symantec etc. User groups were originally imagined to harbour pirates and hackers (the new definition) and therefore not worth bothering about. We know that is not the case: our user group includes people who are members of parliament, corporate buyers or those who recommend products, students, home users, business users etc. Generally speaking, a user group is made up of people motivated enough to learn more about their machine and software. It is perhaps more effective to target such an audience than rely on commercial magazine or direct muff exposure alone.
Borland's First Retreat
This was the first retreat hosted by Borland. They invited user group presidents (or their representatives) from North America, UK, USSR, and Denmark. It also invited officers of the Association of PC User Groups and that is how I sneaked in. I was visiting the US on other business and although I missed out on Spring Comdex in May, I was able to coincide the trip with this retreat. The guest list had 63 names, and my guess is that the cost of food and accommodation alone was US$500 per person.
Sunday, June 9
The first speaker was Philippe Kahn, founder, President and CEO of Borland International. He has once addressed Melb PC members in Melbourne, so many of you are familiar with his enthusiastic personality. To the dismay of his staff. Philippe pre-announced about four future Borland products in the course of his overview of the product range. While he was waxing lyrical about Quattro Pro, one of the British visitors made a remark that Lotus 1-2-3 has better "smart icons". Whew! Philippe spent the next 40 minutes "explaining" why the gentleman was mistaken, almost with religious fervour.
Philippe related an event that occurred the previous day. He was having a haircut at Supercuts (a budget-priced chain of hairdressers) when the lady next to him was heard saying how she worked for Borland and would not normally be seen there as she was so important. Philippe engaged her in conversation but he was not recognised by his employee. He ascertained that she worked in Marketing or Sales. We can only guess her reaction when she saw him at work the following week!
Monday, June 10
In the morning we heard an overview of the Languages Business Unit from Tom Wu, its Senior Product Marketing Manager. Later we asked questions of the Turbo Pascal and C++ R&D teams. The afternoon was spent with the Spreadsheet Business Unit, where we saw a demonstration of Quattro Pro 3.0 and met the R&D team led by Dave Anderson. After dinner, we were able to use Borland products on about 10 networked PCs; Borland employees were at hand to offer help if needed.
Tuesday, June 11
Rob Dickerson, VP and General Manager of the Database Business Unit (DBBU) gave an outstanding performance as he explained the Paradox Engine and related products. He truly knows his subject well. The presentation by the head of the DBBU Quality Assurance department gave a valuable insight into this little-known activity.
Paul Curtis, the APCUG Globalnet sysop and Board member, and co-sysop Rich Sabin gave a demonstration of the 16-line BBS (see PC Update, Sept 1990). At Spring Comdex IBM Corporation generously donated four PS/2 Model 90 (80486) computers to the APCUG for setting up satellite BBSs in Melbourne, Kyoto, Paris and Swindon (UK). I have been named the sysop of the Melbourne node, which will have 16 lines and will be housed at Borland premises in Albert Road, South Melbourne. The main APCUG BBS will be expanded to 32 lines with the next release of TBBS (BBS software), all running on MS-DOS 4.01 without any special multitasking program Yuri Sobolev and Andrey Sotov gave an enlightening account of the state of the Soviet software market. Although piracy was previously rampant in the USSR, where PCs are used largely by organisations, it is disappearing now.
The evening presentation by "Saint Silicon" was outstanding. He is really Jeffrey Armstrong, a former Apple employee who "saw the light and opted for the full-time corporate entertainment business. He uses pseudo-Biblical computer language to preach his "religion" and keeps the crowds in stitches. I hope Melb PC can have him here one day. See the box for an extract from his book "The Binary Bible" (ISBN 0-945130-00-7) US$14.95.
Wednesday, June 12
An ObjectVision demo followed by a comprehensive description of Borland's technical support process ended the formal presentations. Jim Fitzgerald, Manager Languages Technical Support described how his group handles customer queries. This is detailed later in this article.
APCUG Secretary Jerry Schneider has contacts at the right places. He had disappeared earlier and showed up with a carload of MS-DOS 5.0 for US$42 a copy! They were snapped up quickly. Later he paid Intel a visit and came back with a carload of free Intel mouse pads. Some lucky PC Update readers will receive some of these goodies and others supplied by Borland.
The activities were capped off by a grand barbecue picnic at a nearby park. A bluegrass band provided music and the food kept coming. Globalnet sysop and practical joker Paul Curtis was "surprised" by "one of his many wives" who showed up with two children and a sheriff. Following a quick trial, he was taken to a nearby tree to be hanged. His fast talking saved his neck. Some people walked to see a sequoia (Redwood tree) museum while the rest of us talked with Borland staff.
The Borland staff must have been sweating all week because none of us had signed any non-disclosure forms prior to being told about the new products. They finally showed up with some for one of the products (some visitors had already left for home!). So we did the right thing and signed the forms. This meant we'll receive a free copy of the released product. "What about the other three?" we asked, "We'll sign NDs for them tool" No such luck.
Borland Customer Support
Borland's Customer Support deserves special mention. It is broken down into Customer Service and Technical Support Customer Service comprises handling as separate activities large accounts and end users. Technical Support, like other activities at Borland, is split into the three business units.
About 60,000 customers (up 20,000 from 1990) each month contact Borland through the following channels:
- Online
- Facsimile (Fax)
- Letter
- Telephone
- TechFAX
- Automated Paradox Support
Each customer call (via any means) is logged into ESP, which runs on a Novell network and each support person can access it. Each call is a "case" and the customers previous cases are available for browsing (but cannot be changed) at a later time. This ensures that the customer doesn't have to repeat the same story to the next support person. The advice given is recorded on ESP and, if the situation is not unique, it is added to the company's knowledge base. Tallies of cases are fed back to the business units and serve to keep the developers aware of where the problems lie. Some "bugs" turn out to be ambiguous statements in the manuals that cause users to expect features that
don't exist.
One of ESP's features is the ability to send the customer a fax immediately by calling up a list of stored fax images and pressing a few buttons through the mouse. This reduces the risk of forgetting to do something that was promised to the customer.
Each telephone support person is trained in the art of oral communications. This is important because programmers in general are not noted for their ability to talk the same language as the rest of us. They might come across as patronising or curt unless they learn how to be tactful and relate to the needs of the situation.
What is the profile of a typical support engineer? About 95 percent have degrees, typically in the sciences, preferably computer science. Jim related the story of this physics graduate who had only a couple of units in "Computing for Idiots" but he was "on fire" and trembled with excitement as he clutched a printout of a device driver he had written. He was hired, and two years later was poached internally by another department, where he is writing the next generation of debugger. The Database group hires slightly older staff who have a business degree and some real-world experience, so that they can understand the caller's needs. The typical engineer puts in about 12 hours a day, and more when needed.
The TechFAX system is used by several other companies in the US. One needs a fax machine with a tone-dial telephone: you dial the number and then press the digits corresponding to the information you need. The system then sends you a fax containing that information.
Borland can be contacted electronically via Compuserve, BIX, GEnie, their own BBSs (including one in Sydney). Every support engineer logs onto one of these boards and answers queries unless someone else has already provided a satisfactory reply. A group of Borland fans named "Team Borland" also helps other users on BBSs and they are "well looked after" by Borland.
Borland International is a company to watch. With its new partnership with IBM, it will rise in prominence. Its C++ products are highly regarded and have the advantage over Microsoft that the latter
hasn't released its version yet. It attracted the ire of Lotus over a "look and feel" issue, and that matter is yet to be settled in the courts. Lotus advertisements now even mention Quattro Pro, so that is a reluctant admission of that products legitimacy. Their pricing policy will appeal to many part-time programmers and will bring them out of the closet. The commercial reviews are all mainly complimentary of their products. One user remarked to me, though, "I hope that they don't get too big too soon". Time will tell.
Reprinted from the August 1991 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
