Borland , like others like IBM with its Rational line, is breaking out of its monolithic development tools (JBuilder and Together primarily) into Core products designed to meet specific development roles. For example Core Architect contains architecting with design patterns, UML modeling, design metrics, etc. Code Developer drops the modeling and metrics/requirements but adds testing, profiling, and code analyzers. And so on.
We applaud this differentiation even though prices rise yet again. What would be better is if Borland and IBM took a hint from the Open Source tools. Set a relatively low (certainly does not have to be free) price for the basic tool then charge more for the state of the art plugins where largest ROI and productivity gains are to achieved.
In its defense one can say with JBuilder Foundation for free, Borland is already doing this. The problem is with Core and Eclipse based Peloton emerging its not clear where the point of entry into the Borland Java development line is at. However with steady improvements in Eclipse and especially NetBeans, there is no confusion in the case of Open Source Java.
(c) JBSurveyer 2005