Odd timing
I got an email this morning from Embarcadero, a pretty straightforward marketing letter that probably everyone on SA for Delphi received. But one thing caught my eye:
64-bit is scheduled to be released this August.
That’s not particularly unexpected, since that’s when the new releases tend to come out. But it does confirm one thing I thought was kind of strange when I got the DelphiLive! 2011 Call For Papers email a few weeks ago.
The conference is scheduled for mid-September, which means that for the first time, it’s going to be held after the year’s new Delphi release instead of before it. That’s a pretty sharp contrast with last year, where the keynote address was basically the official RAD Studio XE release announcement…
64-bit is scheduled to be released this August.
That’s interesting. I let me SA lapse last year amid all the talk about cross-platform etc, but only after asking my SA reseller and Emarcadero reps to tell me what was coming for the new release, wanting them to convince me to stay on SA, but I couldn’t even get an answer. Sounds like your SA email this year included at least one reason to stay on. What a great idea, give people a reason to stay on SA, who would have thought keeping your existing customers in the loop would have been a good idea. I am a KSDEV user too, now really kicking myself…
Released, but in what state ?
Was Delphi 8 the first “release” of Delphi.NET, or was the Delphi.NET preview in Delphi 7 the first “release” ? They have said all along that there would be a 64-bit preview before any major product release. A limited beta doesn’t constitute a preview in my mind, not in the sense that a Delphi licensee might expect (given the Delphi.NET “preview” beastie that came before).
Perhaps I should stop drawing parallels with Delphi.NET…. we all know what happened to that in the end.
Maybe August is the preview release, but then to follow up with a full product release 1-2 months later wouldn’t seem plausible to my mind.
In any event, I’m not getting excited just yet.
Thanks for the heads up. I renewed earlier this year. I don’t think I had that bullet point in my renewal e-mail.
They were supposed to publish 64-bits compiler preview in the 1st half of 2011, so I expected to have a compiler preview in the first quarter of the year, and then a new major version with cross-compiling features for Mac in September.
Now I am kinda worried that we might just get a bunch of Delphi XE bug fixes + another bunch of limited version of 3rd-party stuff + a preview of a command line 64-bits compiler, packaged all together as Delphi XE II ! Then a new Delphi Live conference with a new roadmap which defers everything just one more year! Maybe it is too pessimistic, but it is been a while I lost my faith in Embarcadero’s words or roadmaps and published schedules (if they ever have such a thing at all).
I guess we’ll have to see what happens.