Re: Wild speculations about the "other" factors

Simon Kissel wrote:

Are they in total contrast to what the customers represented by the
"public samples" say? Have they shifted from maintaining Win32
projects to .NET? Or are they mostly doing ASP.NET stuff with Delphi?

However, it also means (at least if those enterprise customers mainly
do Delphi.NET) that you've got two big camps of customers with very
conflicting interests, and whatever side you focus on (for the last
releases, the enterprise customers, obviously), the other side will
be unhappy. Not a nice situation I guess.

I would be extremely surprised if it were that biased for each segment. Most
enterprises don't simply rewrite tons of existing applications at the drop
of a hat anymore than small developers do (at least not the rational ones
<g>). Thus it should be safe to say that the largest enterprise customers
will *also* continue to need native code support for at least several years
as they cannot let their existing applications stand still. At the same
time, the larger enterprises are likely also, in general, going to be in the
lead when it comes to adopting .Net for new development and, gradually, for
replacement of legacy apps.

So in one sense you are probably right - the need of such large customers to
move more and more to .Net is going to require DTG to focus on delivering
the needed support there, but again, the continuing need to support existing
applications (and likely at least some new development still) means they
cannot ignore native code either. IOW again its a matter of finding the
right balance that will result in making happy as many customers as possible
*overall*.

Then I found an
article about Borland selling its IDE business, and that said
that IDE products now only make up 7% of the revenue, dropping
from previously 14%.

I have not gone back to verify, but I am very certain I recall that figure
being *only for JBuilder* - that product, once the Java leader, has
definitely suffered due to the free Eclipse product. However, Borland/DTG is
attempting to move JBuilder into a position where it might be able to regain
some of that market as well. Note that this means that the remainder, 93%,
of IDE revenue must, by definition, be at least mostly from BDS. Taking
Michael's figure of 30% of revenue, that means annual IDE= ~$90 million, and
possibly as much as ~83 million of that from BDS.

FWIW, I'm also still not too sure you really got much up-to-date data
about that at your hands yourself. After all, the Delphi sales numbers
from recent years don't give a basis to derive what parts / languages
/ platforms are used by your enterprise customers.

Because the enterprise-level customers are clearly so important to the
business, it's rather a sure bet that they research those needs. Such
customers are going to be able to tell DTG what their direction and future
needs are quite easily - more so than small developers often can. E.g. as
little as 6 months ago, while I was hoping one .Net project would go ahead
soon, even that was iffy. That one probably still won't go until spring at
least, but in the meantime I now have two other .Net projects started and
likely a 3rd before end of year. I simply had no way to predict that though.
An enterprise developing for its *own* needs can say with certainty, and
much earlier, exactly what they want to be able to do.

--
Wayne Niddery - Winwright, Inc (www.winwright.ca)
"Nature abhors the vacuum tube." - J.R. Pierce, Bell Labs engineer who
coined the term 'transistor'


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