Advantages and Disadvantages of different technologies and value of Inprise.
All the past discussions concerning advantages and disadvantages of different technologies, in my opinion, are complete irrelevant to the value of Inprise. The real problem is that Inprise/Borland's products delivering these technologies are always Too Little, Too Late.
It's not really important what the future holds for a particular technology (eg, Java, COM) or what the total revenue from that technology-based products will be. What is important to most members of this forum is that Inprise is not in a market leader in any product that delivers these techologies.
I believe Symantec's Cafe has greater market share and derives more revenue than Inprise's JBuilder does. How was that allowed to happen when Borland was first to the market with Java support included with their C++ package?
As for C++, Microsoft Visual C++ almost essentially dominates the C++ market for Windows. How did that happen when Borland used to be the only C++ package on the market?
As for Visigenic's middleware, Iona, an Irish company that just focuses on CORBA middleware, has greater revenue and greater profits than Visigenics ever did.
As for Delphi, Microsoft's VB generates far greater revenue not just for MS but for all the developers using VB. So who cares if Delphi is technologically a superior product?
As for databases, dBase and Interbase are are probably insignificant revenue sources.
So, for every technology for which Inprise develops a product, some other company always makes more money and owns a more "relevant" market share than Inprise does. |
