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Technology Stocks : INPR - Inprise to Borland (BORL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lewis Edinburg who wrote (27)	5/4/1998 8:58:00 AM
From: Mark Bracey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5102

Written by David Intersimone on Fri May 1 21:28:58 1998 To: Borland's New Name Message Number: 38739 To Jesse Berst: a few responses to your column about the new company Inprise Corporation - from an Inpriser (Borlander): >1. Concerns about stability. When it comes to enterprise software, >corporate buyers demand a strong, solid partner. If you think rats >desert a sinking ship, you should see corporate buyers scramble >to ditch a shaky tools vendor. 5 quarters of revenue growth, 4 quarters of profits. new products, new customers, new updates to existing products. yes, we need another year of profits and revenue growth to be completely turnedaround. I don't see corporate buyers running away. I see large corporations agreeing with our focus and buying in to our strategy of a complete and open solution for distributed object computing with a choice of development environments, languages, middleware and services. >2. Concerns about technical leadership. There has been lots of >speculation about the poor job done by ousted CEO Gary Wetzel, >and current CEO Del Yocum. Whether any of it is accurate, it is >true they were not viewed as technical visionaries. Losing their >chief technology officer to Microsoft didn't help. Click for full story . such old news. the past leadership you mentioned was not technical, young and inexperienced in the tools market. Losing which chief technology office to Microsoft? the only chief technology officers we have had in all the years are Rick LeFaivre and Roger Sippl - both still here. We've have senior VPs, chief architects of different products. Are you referring to Paul Gross? He was only SR VP of R&D and part of the office of the president when Gary Wetzel was fired. I know all these people personally being here for 13 years now. I hope you will tell the whole story instead of rehashing old news that has no bearing on the company we have now. You're talking 2 year old news and older. >3. Concerns about reputation. When Borland sued Microsoft for >"stealing" its best employees, it not only lost the suit, but it got >millions of dollars of bad publicity about how its best people were >now gone. Click for full story. See #1. We lost the suit? actually no one lost the suit - and some would say that Borland actually has a better partner relationship with microsoft because of the action. At microsoft's Professional Developer Conference last september in san diego, borland presented a major keynote for 45 minutes in front of 6200 of microsoft's best developer partners showing more support for microsoft platforms and api's that even microsoft's tools demos. our best people are gone? that cheapens the work of the world class people who are here still delivering award winning (even from ZD publications) products. When you cut one rose from the bush, more grow even more beautiful. We have loads of top talent. this is not to say anything bad about the ex-borlanders (inprisers) - they are all great developers and friends who left for a variety of reasons. >4. Concerns about focus. First Borland destroyed dBASE with >dumb moves. Then tossed Quattro overboard. Then tried to >promote its mid-range database (InterBase). Then decided it was >a hard-core tools company. Then a Java company. Now it is an >enterprise company. Huh? again as a 13 year employee involved at the top levels here - I must saw that in the past 18 months or more - we have a very refined focus on development environments and middleware. what could be more focused? I would agree that over the years we have tried to focus on too many things, but in the last 2 years we have focused completely on development - and yes we have included more developer markets and segments to focus on, but they are all very orthogona David Intersimone "David I" Director, Developer Relations Inprise Corporation Borland and Visigenic Products