David R.
Sorry about my last message. I jumped on some pulse when i read your
message:
>
>As I heard it, BORL had 2 employees with the same name. HR laid off the wrong one, and
>before the mistake could be corrected, MSFT hired this brilliant and pissed of engineer.
>But that was SV rumor many years ago.
> David R.
Is this a true story or not ? I have seen so many INPR/BORL bashing
messages recently that when I saw this message of yours, I thought you were
also trying to present a lie against BORL/INPR based on some untrue rumour.
The way I look at Inprise:
1) A lot of people/students use Borland's products to learn programming and
almost all of them are happy about Borland's tools.
2) The future of programming is distributed programming. This future is
very near - perhaps it has already arrived. The fact that PCs/CPUs got
so cheap and with the appearence of cheap networking products, gigabit
networks coming - parallel & distributed architectures made up of
cheap COTS (commercially off the shelf components) are here. Look at
the fastest computers that are built now and how little they cost.
(check out Gordon Bell prizes given at supercomputing conf.) Look at the
EMBEDDED SYSTEMS that are starting to appear everywhere, from cars to
homes etc. These are all distributed systems which need programmers
who can do distributed programming.
Students now ask for help on how they can program their multiple
PCs at home. We need CORBA, distributed objects for distributed
programming.
3) It will be very easy/convenient for universities to introduce programming
with Pascal, then continue with C++, then show how to do distributed
programming with Inpr Visigenic Corba.
4) IONA's CORBA is expensive/too user unfriendly for universities.
IONA CORBA may be
superior (or more correctly it used to be when CORBA first appeared), but
I believe as more and more MS/PHDs publish(ed) their results, algorithms
will be/are available which will/ enable other comers to just implement
CORBA as good as , if not better than IONA.
In short, IONA maybe the first in the CORBA area and they may be
profiting a lot from this. But I do not think IONA can push their
product into mass market. I believe the company who
enters this market later, and enters it in a big way/user friendly way
will be the winner. And
this second company is INPR which has much more user base and more
user-friendly tools. I think
we can make an analogy here look at Lotus/word processing and how
the second comer Microsoft took away everything with office.
5) We are living in a period, where the job market is very tight - look
at what is happening in the job market - look at the huge
demand for programmers. Whom are these companies going to hire ? These
students who grew up on Borland/Inpr products. These students will then
use INPR Visigenic CORBA rather than mess with IONA's CORBA.
6) All these observation/reasoning convinced me that what Del has done
so far and the plans he is pursuing make very good sense.
I will challenge those INPR bashers, those people
who complain/nag about Del to come up with alternative plans for
INPR (BORL). The only reason INPR stock price fell down recently is because
of these nagging investors who do not know the value of what they
are holding. |
