Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Remembering Mansour Safai

November 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Remembering Mansour Safai

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Mansour Safai, who passed away just over a year ago, is probably best known among the Java community for leading the development of the first Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Symantec's Visual Café.

I had the pleasure of knowing and working with Mansour for a number of years. Initially, we competed in the IDE space when he led a number of C++ projects at Symantec and I was at Borland working on Delphi. I had gotten to known Mansour during this time and was always impressed with his enthusiasm, technical depth and most importantly, his values. Mansour was a straight shooter. "Cards on the table," he would tell me, and I knew he was being completely honest and candid.

Mansour was one of the first to see the potential of Java and consequently Symantec was first to market with their Java IDE. He used it as a game-changing move to pull ahead of Borland, Microsoft and others. He leveraged all of the lessons he learned in building the Multiscope Debugger and other developer tools and shipped a Java IDE while the rest of us were still figuring it out. Mansour made Java accessible to millions of programmers around the world.

A few years later, after Symantec had spun out their tools division, Mansour contacted me. He had started a new company, called M7, along with some of the key developers from Visual Café. I found his enthusiasm and vision contagious, and so I joined. (The company was so small that we joked that we would now have to change the name of the company to M8, reflecting the number of employees.)

No matter what ups and downs there were (and there were plenty) Mansour always carried the vision of the company, which was to make developers lives easier. Mansour was relentless in continuing to lead the team. Not relentless in the sense of being a dictator or mean-spirited. I mean he was relentless in terms of giving the team his all and doing whatever it took.

Mansour cared deeply about the team he had built at M7 and he saw it through to a successful acquisition by BEA. He did this even while he was battling for his life.

Next week commemorates Mansour's birthday and his brother and sister Mammad and Massy Safai have started a memorial fellowship fund at Stanford University. You can find out more about this fund at www.mansour-safai-fund.org.

Posted by Zack Urlocker on November 30, 2007 10:30 AM

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