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

To: Dennis Nicks who wrote (1286)	9/25/1998 4:48:00 PM
From: Mark Bracey	Respond to of 5102

Even though Inprise is going corporate, I found it interesting the other day when I went into a Computer City (I think) and was greeted as I walked in with a poster 4x3 feet which advertised JBuilder.

To: Dennis Nicks who wrote (1286)	9/25/1998 9:32:00 PM
From: shane forbes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5102

Dennis: I know about PC Data and to be frank I am not sure I trust their data. Go to their site at pcdata.com and you can check out some of their monthly lists for various categories of products. Having said that, looking at the numbers you posted, 2 things stand out: (1) I am not sure who the other companies the PC Data would have included other than Inprise mainly. Would Microsoft Junk++ (<g>) be included as a Java tool here? Does IBM aggressively sell stuff thru retail stores (I think this is what PC Data measures)? I have seen Sun as well but not much. So does this mean that when V.Cafe does x %, Inprise does (100-x)%. Highly unlikely but yet I suspect these 2 get a chunk of the market (and here again I assume that no one is considering V.J++ a Java tool <g>). So maybe even when V.Cafe did 43%, JBuilder did something greater than 30%? So regardless not bad if the above assumptions are valid. (2) I think it is interesting that their numbers went down when JBuilder2 came out in May! ---- Big picture, Symantec seems to me at least to be a fish out of water doing development tools! I am not so sure they can (or want to?) pull off the l/t move to the Enterprise - people like Inprise and IBM have a lot more experience. I think they initially thought V.Cafe would be cool to build applets for the net but that interest fizzled. They had the lead initially but when Borland came out with their tool and IBM continued to do their thing I think Symantec's balloon began to deflate. And I think the air is still going out these days - though it is clearly still a very viable product these days. I also saw something recently that said JBuilder was the best selling Java tool though I have to check on this. On another level I think Java on the client on the net is waning in popularity - for instance how many sites have Java applets these days? I think the whole bandwidth thing (not enough of it on the client side) convinced a lot of people to not go the Java route. Which is OK. I actually did not think the applet think over the net made much sense and it won't until the bandwidth pipes get thicker at residences. Then it should do just dandy. And main point is that, as you indicated, it is all really moot since Inprise is doing the Enterprise thing. Shane.