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

To: TTOSBT who wrote (1557)	10/31/1998 11:01:00 AM
From: Shroder Wertheim (Hijacked)	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5102

Inprise should go into Linux tools market, at least it should serious consider it and decision has to be made quickly. Otherwise, I do not see where is the growth coming from. "Prolifics To Release Linux Development Tools"

To: TTOSBT who wrote (1557)	11/5/1998 2:06:00 PM
From: Jack Frosch	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 5102

The only requirement of management of any company is to ensure the company's profits satisfy investors. They don't work for the consumer, or the society, or the government; they work for the owners of the company. Many of the owners will never even use the products made by the company; the only thing they see are the profits (or losses). Usually, making a better product will result in higher profits, but not necessarily so. BetaMax VCR, Inc. clearly would have made a better product than VHS VCR, Inc., but I wouldn't want to be holding any BetaMax stock today. No matter how good the product or service is, if profits fall, so will the stock price. Conversely, Microsoft is renowned for making a ton of money selling mediocre products in its monopoly space. I'm still long on Inprise because they do make such excellent products that sell well, though not fantastically. They have a monopoly in Delphi sales, but pretty much everyone who is going to use Delphi in the future is using it now, so little market growth is likely in that area. JBuilder stands a chance of owning the Unix market if they make it 100% Java, so I'm optimistic about it. C++ Builder is a fantastic product, but was introduced two years too late. Many C++ shops are now looking to move to Java and won't even consider investment in a new C++ tool. Those that have invested in learning the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) can't afford to learn the far-superior Visual Component Library offered in C++ Builder. (It's true that C++ Builder now let's you code with MFC, but why should someone move from Microsoft Visual C++ to Borland C++ Builder to do MFC development?) It's a tough spot for Inprise having to clean up Borland's loss of marketshare mess, and in the C++ world, I doubt they can do it. Companies beat Micosoft by finding new markets, not competing in the same space. That's why Sun's Java is a killer to MS, but Sun's C++ never was. Netscape exposed an entire market MS was unaware of. JBuilder can own the Unix market because MS won't play there because it risks undercutting Windows sales. Same with the Mac and Palm Pilot markets. HTML, XML, and other non-Windows standards are also areas MS will have a tough time owning because no one will accept a Windows-only standard on the Internet. For those of you interested, it was Borland geniuses that moved Sun into adopting an excellent component standard in Java, called JavaBeans. The problem is, Sun's making money off of Borland ideas, Symantec's making a ton of money off of Borland ideas, but Inprise is making hardly any money off their own ideas! (Is Inprise getting a percentage of the Java royalties? I don't think so! Yet JavaBeans is a huge part of Java's success, like VBX's were to Visual Basic.) I'm still long because I think Inprise's VisiBroker and App Server will allow them to profit from their own genius in a way their tools haven't. After all, top novelists have always made more money using words than those who create dictionaries! Sadly, that has been the pattern with Borland, now Inprise, for too long. They're kind of like the old Bell Labs was to the phone companies. They innovate, but are essentially a cost center, while other companies sell products based on their innovations and are the profit centers. I'm still troubled why they aren't making more money off the VisiBroker licenses. VisiBroker owns the CORBA server market, yet Inprise shows a puny 2 cents a share return for the quarter. (I sometimes think if Borland had discovered the Golden Goose, they'd have invited IBM, Sun, and Oracle executives over for for a goose barbeque instead of selling its eggs to them at a premium!) I remain confident in Del's plan, but his marketing people better start making some money for me; I've got Inprise upgrades to buy next spring!