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Gustavo Eydelsteyn
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Staking Out the Microsoft Component Space
ComponentOne is a big player in a niche it helped create, the third-party development space for Microsoft development tools.
by Patrick Meader
May 10, 2006
"The Microsoft third-party component space is fiercely competitive," says Gustavo Eydelsteyn, founder of VideoSoft and now managing director of ComponentOne. "But if you're nimble, and if you're willing to rethink your core products every three years, it can be a nice space to be in."
ComponentOne was formed in 2000 by the merger of VideoSoft and Apex, companies that had been in the VB aftermarket component space almost from the beginning. VideoSoft, founded by Eydelsteyn in 1991, kicked off its support of the first version of Visual Basic with its Elastic control. Apex was founded slightly earlier—1987—and entered the VB component market slightly later, during the VB2 timeframe. Apex's background was in databases. The company initially created a core database engine for dBase, and it focused on providing databinding and grid controls for the Visual Basic market. Sunny Wong acquired the company some time later, and he and Eydelsteyn now share the title of managing director of ComponentOne. Wong manages ComponentOne's office on the East Coast, in Pittsburgh, while Eydelsteyn manages the West Coast office based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
VideoSoft and Apex helped create the third-party component space that is ComponentOne's core market. Visual Basic was launched at Windows World in May 1991, and VideoSoft released its first control later that year. Based on a prototype created by Alan Cooper and sold to Microsoft, Visual Basic was a highly innovative programming language that married the ease of the Basic programming language to the then more arcane task of creating Windows applications—which had been notoriously difficult to create prior to the release of Visual Basic.
One of the key ways that VB simplified programming for Windows: It let you build programs visually, with pre-made graphical components that you dragged and dropped onto a form, then wired together with code to create application functionality. This in itself was a significant innovation. It took a lot of complex code to draw even basic windows if you used C, and Visual Basic slashed the difficulty level of building these windows. But Visual Basic took this idea one step further. Microsoft made its toolbox of pre-made controls extensible. Third-party companies were able to plug into VB's architecture to add a wide variety of widgets and other graphical controls, usually for only a nominal cost to the consumer. And a market was born.
Much has changed in the third-party component market over the years. Visual Basic as a language grew more powerful, and the components that plug into the tool grew both more powerful and more sophisticated. Microsoft adopted a VB-like integrated development environment (IDE) for all its development languages, including C#, which were made similarly extensible, although providing controls and services for VB remained the main focus for those who exist in the third-party add-on space. As the market itself matured, companies such as VideoSoft and Apex went from selling single components for $99 or so, to selling entire suites of components for hundreds of dollars, and more, in some cases.
VideoSoft and Apex both helped create and grow the market for third-party development tools for Microsoft programming environments. Both companies expanded their repertoires of available components, with VideoSoft adding spell checkers, grid controls, and other GUI enhancements; Apex added to its offerings of database and databinding controls. The pace of change was always torrid, with Microsoft offering radically upgraded versions of Visual Basic (and later, Visual Studio) roughly every three to five years. So, Visual Basic 3 introduced significant new database and UI enhancements in 1993, and Visual Basic 5 introduced the ability to create extensible DLLs and custom controls that extended and added to the controls provided in the VB toolbox. The most recent major change represented the most radical of these periodic upgrades: the introduction of .NET in 2001, which completely altered the VB programming language and introduced its sibling language, C#.
With each major revision of Microsoft's development tools, companies such as VideoSoft, Apex, and later, ComponentOne, were forced to reimagine and reinvent their product lineups. Often, the best ideas of the third-party component vendors were incorporated directly into the development tools themselves.
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