Platform Vendors Put Squeeze on Tools

Application server vendors are following Microsoft’s lead in using developer tools to make their platforms more attractive and are expanding their developer tools efforts in hopes of establishing a dominant position in the nascent market for application servers. This leaves independent tools vendors with the choice of competing head-on with the platform vendors they are trying to support, adopting a cross-platform strategy by supporting multiple platforms, or focusing on areas of the application development life cycle that the big platform vendors are ignoring (although Microsoft’s increasing focus on life-cycle tools, such as application modeling, could close one such opportunity.)

State of Windows and .NET Tools

Many ISVs create developer tools, some exclusively for Microsoft’s or other platforms (particularly Java), and others as part of a multi-platform strategy. The market for developer tools breaks down into several categories:

Core tools are programming language tools that target the core of the application development life cycle: editing source code, compiling that source code into binary form, and debugging the resulting application. This “edit-compile-debug” cycle is where products such as Borland’s Delphi and Powersoft’s PowerBuilder used to compete with Microsoft’s Visual Basic, Visual C#, and Visual C++, but Microsoft now dominates this market on the Windows platform (except for tools for “niche” languages such as COBOL and Fortran) with Visual Studio.