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

To: James Yegerlehner who wrote (9207)	2/24/1998 10:58:00 PM
From: David R	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10836

RE: CE is starting slow like NT did but before long it will be everywhere. I will not say that CE will not be everywhere before long, but the odds are stacked against it. There is certainly a market for CE. Howeger, the hand held market is tough, and US robotics is the only truly successful player ever. The major selling point of the Palm Pilot is not what it does but what it does not do. All previous attempts (and Windows CE) are too complex and cumbersome for simple the job that they are supposed to do. NT was a given with the enterprise PC OS hole. OS/2 could have filled that hole, but it was too little too late, and IBM marketed it very poorly. NT provided a low-cost robust operating system that provided excellent backwards compatibility with Windows and DOS. Hence, with MSFT's $$ NT was certain to reach critical mass. Windows CE does not have such an open market. And history has shown that even MSFT has limits in how much it can drive certain markets, and they have not shown great vision in the hand held market (unlike US Robotics). CE faces stiff competition from the Pilot, and from the up and coming Java based hand helds. I bet it gets relegated to a niche market of business based handhelds (i.e. UPS, Fed Ex, etc.). As a side, BORL already compiles for NT. There is no market for CE yet. I think that they are rightly focusing on the enterprise. Spending precious development $$ (and precious engineering talent) on CE when there is not a big demand from the enterprise would be foolish.

To: James Yegerlehner who wrote (9207)	2/25/1998 12:27:00 AM
From: shane forbes	Respond to of 10836

Might be naivete here but isn't CE really meant for a totally different type of end-market - Information Appliances, Set top boxes and the like? I don't think businesses will be setting up CE workstations right? [At least they have not as of yet. Or am I out to left field here?] So therefore why build for a platform with no market in the business environment (corporations' intranets) when that is Borlands focus point right now? I think BORL is targeting a different application segment - more like large scale Applications development vs. down-and-dirty MFC/CE/systems programming. I think it's the proper focus for BORL at this stage. Besides, at one point Borland's products could not compile MFC. Now they can. When the day comes for CE maybe Borland will have a version for the CE market. My sense is that it is way too early right now. And therefore need not be a critical focus at this time.

To: James Yegerlehner who wrote (9207)	2/25/1998 8:18:00 AM
From: Jeroen Pluimers	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10836

Jim, I'm not sure about CE, but for the 64-bit and other 32-bit platforms you are right: Those are where the enterprise are going to and they need to be backed by the Borland compilers. jeroen

To: James Yegerlehner who wrote (9207)	2/25/1998 10:37:00 PM
From: Kashish King	Respond to of 10836

With limited resources, Borland should stay clear of Windows CE which is a non-object-oriented, non-secure, non-portable, environment which locks you into one vendor. Retailers such as Home Depot have made the decision to go with Java-based devices and Motorola will support Java across the board. Even those companies which Microsoft has made heavy investments has had to have their arms twisted off at the socket to use CE over Java. A stripped-down version of Windows is hardly going to compete with a technology which was designed from the ground up to scale down to miniature computing devices. My theory is that Java need only be competitive and it will win hands down by virtue of its open architecture. It's not only competitive, it's generally superior. As for the I-64 support, that's a non-issue insofar as there aren't any and when there are Borland will be ready with a product. I agree that they should announce that the program is in place and that they are taking part in the I-64 SDK beta programs in case anybody has doubts.