Re: where will the action be ?

So you think they could seriously have, three years ago, just ignored the
latest MS bandwagon and 'way of the future' and not suffered for it?

In all likelyhood, Delphi 8 made them suffer more than any other non-.Net release ever could have (cf. .Net Service Pack issue)

How does being some secondary .Net development tools help? 

I don't know if you're even seriously asking this or just trying to stir the
pot. There are heaps of ways, credibility with PHBs being just one of them.


You're just being vague. What does it bring into the greater scheme?
How many VS shops have been converted to Delphi because of .Net support?

More fundamentally, is .Net really "credible" those days?
I mean, how many people are asking for .Net applications *because* they are .Net applications? (can't think of any besides ASP.Net)
How does that situation compare with, f.i. people asking for java applications because they are Java applications? (these are legion)
Until Avalon or Indigo are released, there is no real need for .Net support, but today, Win64 has been released, but neither Avalon/Indigo nor .Net 2.0 has, all you have is old .Net 1.1 which is inferior in most aspects to the VCL.

Also, what is the credibility benefit in following the MS techies who didn't foresee that the ever-increasing-CPU-speeds era was at an end?

Wouldn't that actually be mixing up credibility with hype? ;)

It can only be trying to play catchup with MS. Under .Net MS controls
the programming libraries, not just the OS and system APIs.

I totally agree.

Well, then you should see where the credibility issue lies: how can you be credible on a platform where you'll only play catchup? What kind of credibility is that?

It's all a balance of power, demonstrating that you can use a competitor's development libraries is a nice tech demo, but that's not what will make people come, because there is little added value in that.

Added value is in what you can do, but the competitor's can't, and having added value is where credibility (as a company) truly resides.

IIRC, they didn't announce they were doing Delphi.net till they'd spent
quite some time on it already, and 'everyone' was screaming for it.

Well, the .Net preview was in D7 wasn't it?

Yes, but they spent years from go to D8. 

Indeed, but that was about your "they didn't announce" comment ;)

I'm sure they started .net research and development well before 
> the D7 .net preview was made available.

Aye, but they also announced it a long time before it was "complete" with the preview.

Exactly. But by the same token, they've probably already started researching
it.

I would hope so, but the defensiveness we saw here hints at another story. Maybe it was just a Pavlovian reaction, maybe not.

Fact is that between 64bit and multicore, 64bit was definetely the easier of the two, they'll now have to tackle both within a rather short time frame. Quad-core desktop CPUs are announced for 2007, and quad-core is already a lot of CPUs to handle if you only have the classic multithreading mechanisms.

Eric
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