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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dybdahl who wrote (57304)	4/12/2001 8:51:56 PM
From: Tom C	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Lars, I am usually very tolerant of your babbling on this thread. When I disagree with you I assume even when you are technically wrong that your heart is generally in the right place but I have to disagree with this statement: When it comes to software quality, Anders is a big asset to Microsoft, but when you look at how Borland stocks are today, I wonder if Microsoft .net might mean the same to Microsoft stocks... Borland was once the third biggest software company in the world. Good software quality doesn't mean big bucks. You ping on MS at times about software quality but you seem to be saying; in the grand scheme of software, quality is a loser. Is that what you meant? Even more surprising to me, you seem to be saying that Anders by virtue of his quality work caused Borland’s stock to be where it is today. I think I could easily make a case that Anders is probably the only reason they still exist today. Purchased: Ashton Tate. Dbase was/is dog food, a horrible acquisition. If it has any relevance at today it’s because they grafted “Delphi” concepts over it. Its biggest problem is that the Windows version came out too late. MS Access took the market. Borland’s first big drop was when it’s CEO pumped the price to $80, but did not deliver and the price went to single digits. Ouuch! Purchased Interbase(as part of DBASE??): Far ahead of it’s time, small footprint database that was not significantly improved or marketed in the last seven years. A technology that never lived up to it’s potential. Never marketed properly. Still a good solid little database but considering that it was ahead of Oracle (Oracle 6) at the time, it didn’t even come close to keeping up from an enterprise perspective. Purchased New Era or something like that: A distributed COM company. Most laid off I guess. Never marketed. Zero revenue today. Purchased a CORBA company in the valley. What happened to that? Maybe when the Chief Tech Officer (former president and founder of the CORBA Company) left, so did the talent. How’s that CORBA orb doing anyway, they paid a lot of that co. It was a merger and resulted in the name INPRISE and diluted ownership doubling the number of shares. Merge with CORL. Wanted to, I repeat, actually WANTED TO merge with CORL!!!! The shareholders revolted. I sold every share of BORL that I owned on the day of the announcement. Delphi 1.0 was an awesome product in its day it was revolutionary. Delphi 2.0, the first 32-bit version was also a great product. I wrote a lot of Object Pascal code, especially when it was a “Windows/Database” program. As a compiled code kind of guy (c,c++, op) back then, I would not even consider VB. After all the missteps by BORL’s ever changing management, and it’s horrible non-existent marketing machine, to suggest the Anders has anything to do with the pitiful state of BORLs stock price is ludicrous. If it wasn’t for Delphi, and the Delphi IDE (integrated development environment) developed by Anders, Borland would not have any products to sell today. Jbuider used a lot of Delphi 1.0/2.0 technology in it IDE. Borland reputation for Quality centered on its OP products. Are their products still of the highest quality today? Are they possibly living on past reputation? J++ was a better developer tool than the first version of Jbuilder but SUN put the screws to that. Tom

To: dybdahl who wrote (57304)	4/12/2001 9:23:45 PM
From: Tom C	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

dybdahl, One more thing, Borland at one time had the best C++ compiler for windows. It came out long before any MS C++ compiler. What happened to that? It eventually sucked so bad that they gave it up and built a Delphi based version called C++Builder. The components were Delphi components. If you wanted to build your own components you had to build them using Delphi. C++Builder and Delphi would generate code that was feed to a really quick compiler that was used by both product to generate code. Maybe Anders knows a thing to two about compilers that accept code from different IDE's and generate code exceptionally fast. Tom