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Technology Stocks : BORL: Time to BUY! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Shane Stump who wrote (8604)	1/20/1998 9:49:00 AM
From: david thor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10836

< It is much more profitable with less headaches to sell to corporations.> I agree and it's obvious Borland feels this way, too. Our company goes through a purchasing agent, so while we buy a fair amount of Borland software, I don't understand how this new sales model fits with our way of purchasing software. I promise, this will be my last "I'm really interested in their presentation today" note! Regards, Dave

To: Shane Stump who wrote (8604)	1/20/1998 12:01:00 PM
From: Scott Pedigo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10836

<It is much more profitable... to sell to corporations.> Yes it is. But as with every strategy, it's not without risk. At work I use a Sun SPARCstation and Rational Apex (for Ada development) which costs over $20K per developer for all the hardware + software licenses. At home I use a PC and Borland C/C++ for 1/4 of that. But I didn't make the Sun/Apex selection - higher up systems people did. Where I used to work, doing sheet metal press control systems, I had some input when the company started a new control system development from scratch. We successfully used PC's with BC and a real-time DOS add-on. Why? I and the others wanted a mainstream development system with which we were familiar, and which would grow with the industry as a whole. I once had to use an antiquated system which got left behind - a CP/M compiler for a Z8001, running on a CP/M emulator on a PC which I wrote myself after getting sick of the slow emulators on the market, or the ones dependent on an NEC CPU with dual 8088/8080 instruction set. What a hassle. No support. So what happens if Borland development systems become a specialty product, only visible to corporate users? The lower echelon users may agitate for a selection they're familiar with, from home, or from school. You know, like Visual C. Maybe the experienced hands will sell them on a superior Borland product, maybe not. I really do like Rational Apex, but the high cost is very off-putting. And in a low-volume high-price niche, it doesn't take many delays in orders before the R&D budget starts to suffer, and the company can't keep up with cheap competitors, starting a downward spiral. Borland C/C++ now has some features rivalling the editor in Apex, such as language sensitive colors/fonts, and browsing of classes, although not quite as sophisticated. Now I'm seeing belated ports of Rational Apex to NT, in response to low-price competition in the Ada market from Aonix and others. When I see my company spend tens or hundreds of $K on SW+HW, sometimes I'm happy to get the new tools, sometimes I cringe thinking how a cheaper product would be just as good and how the difference would have looked in my paycheck. Someday I'll get to make the decisions. Selling quality can be done - witness Compaq - but many have tried to hold the line on prices with their supposedly good name and floundered in the PC business, such as DEC, Oliveti, and arguably IBM.