Re: What I Think Delphi Needs to Do to Survive

Huh? Most "investors" know very little about the kinds of things you
and others here mean when you make such a statement. They look at
things like past revenues, costs, time series characteristics, PE
ratios, the term-structure of the liabilities versus the assets, etc.
None of these technical indicators are going to tell them that Delphi
could thrive if it only had enough investment. In fact it is going
to tell them that it is a risky investment at best, and the expected
profit minus a risk premium is actually very low.

Depends upon the investor. Depends upon what kind of entity the
investor is: Is it a software company that is looking at acquiring
technology or a product, like Google acquiring Writely? You can bet
Google has product plans that it feels Writely would help. If it's a
bunch of beancounters then you're probably right. But any investor
dumb enough to not realize that Delphi needs more resources given to it
is probably going to be sniffed out and eliminated from contention by
David I and Co.

This is actually done all the time by "venture capital" and private
investors. It is common for them to buy products they think are
inefficiently produced, and then go in and try to force greater
"efficiency", by cutting costs. It sometimes works, by the way.

Do you believe David I, and Allen Bauer are going to recommend the
purchase of the IDE team by such a company?

Actually, my track record on these types of things has been pretty
good. For example, I predicted that Aristocrat would kill TurboPower.
I predicted that Chrome would not be a big commercial success or
challenge Delphi in any way in the market.

I missed the whole TurboPower death (except noticing when it happened).
But as far as Chrome, I don't think you needed to be a genius to know
the future there. Chrome is always going to be a niche product. I
always felt that trying to divorce the ObjectPascal language from all
things Delphi (VCL, the IDE, etc) was a losing proposition. A language
is just a language, and there's no real language-based reason to pick
ObjectPascal over C# or VB.NET. RemObjects doesn't seem to understand
that. (not that they haven't done a few nice things to the language -
but not enough to actually cause people to move to their tool).

Randy

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Relevant Pages

  • Re: New Delphi roadmap is coming: NO UNICODE PLEASE!
    ... Added value of the "Delphi" language ... but in and of itself that language is not enough for me to ... consider buying 2 tool products to do something i can do with buying ... If Costs of Delphi Next Gen == Costs of Delphi + Costs of Visual Studio ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: New Delphi roadmap is coming: NO UNICODE PLEASE!
    ... Added value of the "Delphi" language ... but in and of itself that language is not enough for me to ... consider buying 2 tool products to do something i can do with buying ... If Costs of Delphi Next Gen == Costs of Delphi + Costs of Visual Studio ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)