Re: Wild speculations about the "other" factors

Wayne,

[Needs of enterprise customers]
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*.

Well, but if Enterprise customers are not 100% .NET (I agree this isn't
really to be expected), but more like .. say 50/50 .NET/native, then
with the non-Enterprise customers being 80-90% native, this means that
the focus of the current roadmap is not balanced (remember, we are talking
about 5 .NET-focussed releases in a row here before a native-code focussed
may see the light of day).

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.

I'm more than happy to find out the numbers I've picked up probably
are far too low. No matter what route we want Borland/DevCo/DTG to take,
they should be profitable ;)

Because the enterprise-level customers are clearly so important to the
business, it's rather a sure bet that they research those needs.

Might be - maybe they started this recently. I don't have much trust
in that area at least in Borland's *past*. After all, I doubt even the
enterprise customers found Delphi 8 attractive ;)

Simon


.