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

To: Karen Boucher who wrote (687)	7/27/1998 2:14:00 PM
From: TChai	Respond to of 5102

Karen, Thank you for sharing your knowledge and expertise on this thread. Of course the point was brought up earlier that the Borland developers feel abandoned - this is something which could greatly hurt their chances and must be remedied. This does explain part of the reasons the stock dropped almost half from April 29th announcement. It also reflected in the sales of desktop product last quarter which dropped faster than Del had expected. IMHO, Inprise needs to put out extra effort to win back the small developers: 1) Del should make a policy and announce that most if not all of the features in the C/S versions will be available in the PRO versions from within the IDE. This is in line with the standard practice of 3rd party vendors that let people try out their products. For example, if more people have seen and try out Dimension Cube, they would sell a lot more copies. 2) Partition out the C/S features into components and sell them separately. It should not be all or nothing ($2000 or $250) Not that you get nothing for the PRO version, it's a matter of PERCEPTION. Make them feel that they are getting something especially when it doesn't cost INPR anything to do it. (Although they are responding to this issue with the Web Broker components in Delphi 4.) 3) Continue to maintain and promote strong Borland brand name in the PRO version and ISV market. That's a hard fought brand name that shouldn't be discarded. Include a section on the web site for small developers. I don't see Symantec hiding Norton brand name. 4) Port JBuilder to Linux. This will speak loud and clear to small developers and will win back a lot of old and new hearts and minds. Del and Zack (if you're listening), you can win back the developers by empowering them. The early Turbo Pascal included source code for a spreadsheet. Not that anyone did anything with it, they just want to feel that they have the power and the ability to tinker with it. The same practice should continue. Why give up on them only to have to spend money buying back shares? The drop in sales for the desktop versions should tell Del that something should be done to win them back instead of accepting a 20% number. Why? it doesn't cost anything to add features to let them play and tinker. When the patch for Delphi 4 comes out, as a goodwill gesture and a smart business move, I hope to see INPR send out a new CD for every PRO users which includes all the features in the C/S available from the IDE only. This will do a lot more to maintain the revenue while the company is ramping up on the enterprise side.

To: Karen Boucher who wrote (687)	7/27/1998 10:38:00 PM
From: David Miller	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5102

Thanks for the explanations. Just a couple of areas that are still a little unclear. The only other option is to purchase a three-tier development tool which can use the middleware What would be an example of such a three-tier development tool? I would have thought this would be a very attractive market segment, given the market penetration of TP Monitors. MTS on the other hand .... is extremely easy to develop with - they make use of VisualBasic. This makes MTS an attractive choice From a desktop programmer's perspective, yes I can see your point. But I've often heard that VB produces unacceptably long path lengths for transaction processing, due to its origins as a GUI builder. Does Delphi somehow escape this drawback? If InPrise is able to offer this ease of development, and keep loyal developers, they have a good story and a compelling offering. This is the piece I was questioning before. What is it that actually produces the ease of development from an enterprise perspective, as opposed to the desktop perspective that is Inprise's history? david