Board index » kylix » Re: How can Borland make from with Kylix?

Re: How can Borland make from with Kylix?


2005-08-23 07:24:51 AM
kylix0
"Michael Schnell" < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >wrote in message
Quote
>Given your suppositions, it would also never suggest NOT to develop a
>product.

It would. But once the cost for developing it are spent (and you need to
monthly pay the the bank for it), stopping to sell the product would not
reduce the cost.

Of course developing a new version of some existing software is a mix. It
does need some development cost, but of course most of the development for
the product has been done for the previous version. Thus the choice is to
sell nothing (no return at all) or to invest in what is some 10% of the
development and hope for continuing return for 100%.
Ah, I see what you're saying now with respect to the capitol. For Kylix,
it's gone already whether they sell it or not. Fair enough, I understand
now.
At that point, it's a question of what the costs are to maintain and support
vs canning it. Anyone have any ideas?
Rob
 
 

Re:Re: How can Borland make from with Kylix?

On 2005-08-21, Larry Drews < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >wrote:
Quote
Marco van de Voort < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >wrote in
news: XXXX@XXXXX.COM :

>
>There are people that have never been out of work as Cobol programmer
>in 30 years. bad metric for health of the platform.
>

Not for Cobol programmers.
For _those_ Cobol programmers.
Quote
I could not care less is Delphi takes over the
computing world. As long as I can stay employed doing work that I enjoy,
Delphi is enough of a success for me. How many jobs do you need?
One. But it's not always in my control that I can keep it forever, or even
the coming 5-10 years.
But it is even less the job issue that I'm worried about, I have worked as
non-Delphi programmer before, and while I have a slight preference for
Delphi, and more experience, I'm not stuck with it.
However I'm more worried about things like starting a big project in Delphi
now, and finding myself with a toolchain that is essentially unsupported
somewhere down the line, or getting the request to port something to
(linux/64-bit/PDA), and not being able to do it.
 

Re:Re: How can Borland make from with Kylix?

----8<---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From BDN:
bdn.borland.com/article/0,1410,33292,00.html
Daniel Wischnewski, member of our Germany Delphi community, sent Scott
Arnold an email earlier this month. In the email, Daniel asked Scott Arnold,
Borland CEO, "Is there anything you can say either in private or in public
about Borlands standpoint on Delphi?"
Scott replied, "Delphi is very much alive, appreciated, and pushing forward
at Borland." Scott went on to say "the Delphi team is pioneering much of
what we are doing in ALM in the java space by incorporating functionality
from other Borland products like StarTeam and Together into Delphi to make
dev teams more productive."
Read the email from Daniel and the reply by Scott on Daniel's blog at
delphi-notes.blogspot.com/2005/08/email-exchange-with-ceo.html.
----8<---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"theo" < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >wrote in message
Quote

>
>Kylix and Delphi same for me...
>I cant understand that if Delphi is a outstanding, preferable, profitable
>tool in the market, why Kylix not?
>
>

Unfortunately, Delphi's future is unclear too:
www.codefez.com/Home/tabid/36/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/139/ToDelphiorNottoDelphi.aspx
 

{smallsort}

Re:Re: How can Borland make from with Kylix?

Marco van de Voort < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >wrote in
Quote

However I'm more worried about things like starting a big project in
Delphi now, and finding myself with a toolchain that is essentially
unsupported somewhere down the line, or getting the request to port
something to (linux/64-bit/PDA), and not being able to do it.

Seems to me that is the nature of our business. No matter what toolchain
you choose you suffer that same risk, it just a matter of different degrees
and tradeoffs. For example, C/C++ is a more prevalent language and can be
used in such a way as to avoid some of the problems you mentioned. But you
will generally pay the price of much less productivity than Delphi offers
(As a contractor/consultant I generally offer to do a project in Delphi for
50% of the cost of doing it in C/C++).
And being able to port applications from one platform to another simply is
constrained by the type of application. For example, the difference in
screen real estate makes porting of Windows GUI applications to PDA's a
non-starter to begin with.
But if you want to worry, be my guest. We all have to worry about
something!<g>
 

Re:Re: How can Borland make from with Kylix?

I know the "purists" would complain, but I would be fine with a Windows IDE
and the ability to produce executible files for Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac
using real VCL with no QT. Seems to me that those three systems have become
very similiar (all a form of Unix) and XWindows is involved. Just give me
a good basic de{*word*81} for each... i.e. turbode{*word*81}. For the price of PC's
today, it's not hard to get a cheap spare system or find an old used system
to run Linux. Since Mac is going to be x86 based soon, just focus on
compiling on the new x86 systems. Do I think it's possible to make money on
that... for sure. Java and .NET are too slow.... I don't care about the
arguements people have. There is no duplication for true control of a
system and true pointers and freeing up memory. Garbage collection sounds
great, but it's undeterminitic. There is a huge embedded systems world
market out there and they run on x86. Go for the basics, and have a good
closed beta test group.
To prove my point, we are working on GUI that works on Fedora using Kylix
C++ Pro right now and it runs on a VIA 400 MHZ x86 with 64 MB RAM and it
works very fast and it has 8 screens doing very interactive graphics that
are user selectable for runtime or configuration. Kylix has been a huge
time saver for developing the GUI. We don't use it for everything.... the
drivers we write are in straight C and use GCC but for the GUI, Kylix has
worked out great.
-Tom
"siegfriedn" <sniedinger@yahoodotcodotuk>wrote in message
Quote
This is my reply post from the delphi non technical group, but have not
had a reply from JK there, so I am posting it here where it is more
appropriate..

John Kaster (Borland) wrote:

>
>We wanted to make money from Kylix. You are welcome to suggest a
>"different business model" that will make money from Kylix.
>

Thank you for the invitation :)

From the positive hype in the early days of Kylix that was clear and the
future looked bright...you came sooo close.. Kylix is still usable today
even with it's based on a very old linux distributions, so the argumnts
that one cannot have a binary only solution on Linux is not very accurate.

I am not really the person to give you advice on a suitable business
model, but these are just some ideas..

If you have limited resources try to open source (perhaps with a dual
license like Trolltech - commercial license for closed commercial
application and free for GPL applications)

- Make all the CLX source available - (it could be abstracted to support
other GUI toolkits like win32, GTK+, wxWidgets, etc to achieve a native
look) - let the community maintain and develop it under Borland
management. (Probably what you are trying to do with the FreeCLX community
project?)

- Create a 'classic' minimalistic IDE as suggested by someone else. Open
source this IDE and release under a suitable license agreement. The core
architechture for this IDE has to be based on pluaggability - according to
Borland standards. (Almost like Eclipse)

How Borland makes money..
-------------------------

- Sell component packs for example the additional components which are in
the Enterprise edition only.

- Sell IDE plugins for example the SDO/ALM intergration stuff, ECO etc..

- Sell an official shrink rapped 'stable' version of Kylix to corporate
customers with all the Borland goodness and support prepackaged. (Like Sun
with Open Office and StarOffice)


Hope you find it useful :)

siegs
 

Re:Re: How can Borland make from with Kylix?

On 2005-08-23, Larry Drews < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >wrote:
Quote
Marco van de Voort < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >wrote in
news: XXXX@XXXXX.COM :

>However I'm more worried about things like starting a big project in
>Delphi now, and finding myself with a toolchain that is essentially
>unsupported somewhere down the line, or getting the request to port
>something to (linux/64-bit/PDA), and not being able to do it.
>
Seems to me that is the nature of our business. No matter what toolchain
you choose you suffer that same risk,
Qualitatively: yes.
However I worry about Borland being substandard quantitatively.
Quote
And being able to port applications from one platform to another simply is
constrained by the type of application. For example, the difference in
screen real estate makes porting of Windows GUI applications to PDA's a
non-starter to begin with.
I agree with this part though, all my cross-platform experiments reuse the
business logic, and libraries, not the GUI. However I never claimed it
should have to be a blind recompile to port.
I also with the Delphi productivity thing, and that's the main reason why I
stuck with Delphi till now. However e.g. in the .NET sphere the gap is
closing, and with newer VS versions also in native, and at some points,
the benefits aren't worth the trouble anymore.
And abandoning productlines that I (or better, my employer) invested in,
doesn't yield much faith either, no matter how much is re-iterated that it
wasn't profitable, and neither does a D2005 release with only minor new
features for native work.
 

Re:Re: How can Borland make from with Kylix?

Tom wrote:
Quote
I know the "purists" would complain, but I would be fine with a Windows IDE
... For the price of PC's
today, it's not hard to get a cheap spare system or find an old used system
to run Linux.
and it's even easier to use an emulator like Win4Lin, or virtualization like
VMWare to run Wundows and Linux simultaneously.
i'be be quite happy with a version of Delphi on Windows that could produce Linux
or Mac binaries. You can get an awful lot of debugging done using DBGPRINT-like
functionality, either to STDERR or to a disk file.
cheers,
Mat
 

Re:Re: How can Borland make from with Kylix?

siegfriedn <sniedinger@yahoodotcodotuk>writes:
Quote
there are also many different cultures. The 'Linux-folk' you are
refering to will never use Kylix unless it is licensed under the GPL-
they don't need it either.
In addition, having Kylix based on Pascal was a good way to kill it.
Pascal has little enough credibility in the Windows world and
none at all in the Linux universe.
--
Seek simplicity and mistrust it.
Alfred Whitehead
A witty saying proves nothing.
Voltaire
 

Re:Re: How can Borland make from with Kylix?

< XXXX@XXXXX.COM >wrote:
Quote
In addition, having Kylix based on Pascal was a good way to kill it.
Pascal has little enough credibility in the Windows world and
none at all in the Linux universe.
There was a Kylix C++, too.
--
Regards,
Andreas Hausladen
 

Re:Re: How can Borland make from with Kylix?

Borland made mistakes in past like changing the name from Pascal to Delphi,
People thought Pascal "Died", and most potential good programmers changed to
VB, and "if you hit first...", even people in internet see Delphi grows more
even than C++Builder... see the projects developed with both...
If Borland needs to make money, they won't do it taking good products to the
trash... Borland need to invest in universities all around the world. There
are a lot of students that someday will decide what tool to work with, so if
they only see M$ products... guess what...
"siegfriedn" <sniedinger@yahoodotcodotuk>escribi?en el mensaje
Quote
This is my reply post from the delphi non technical group, but have not
had a reply from JK there, so I am posting it here where it is more
appropriate..

John Kaster (Borland) wrote:

>
>We wanted to make money from Kylix. You are welcome to suggest a
>"different business model" that will make money from Kylix.
>

Thank you for the invitation :)

From the positive hype in the early days of Kylix that was clear and
the future looked bright...you came sooo close.. Kylix is still usable
today even with it's based on a very old linux distributions, so the
argumnts that one cannot have a binary only solution on Linux is not
very accurate.

I am not really the person to give you advice on a suitable business
model, but these are just some ideas..

If you have limited resources try to open source (perhaps with a dual
license like Trolltech - commercial license for closed commercial
application and free for GPL applications)

- Make all the CLX source available - (it could be abstracted to support
other GUI toolkits like win32, GTK+, wxWidgets, etc to achieve a native
look) - let the community maintain and develop it under Borland
management. (Probably what you are trying to do with the FreeCLX
community project?)

- Create a 'classic' minimalistic IDE as suggested by someone else. Open
source this IDE and release under a suitable license agreement. The core
architechture for this IDE has to be based on pluaggability - according
to Borland standards. (Almost like Eclipse)

How Borland makes money..
-------------------------

- Sell component packs for example the additional components which are
in the Enterprise edition only.

- Sell IDE plugins for example the SDO/ALM intergration stuff, ECO etc..

- Sell an official shrink rapped 'stable' version of Kylix to corporate
customers with all the Borland goodness and support prepackaged. (Like
Sun with Open Office and StarOffice)


Hope you find it useful :)

siegs
 

Re:Re: How can Borland make from with Kylix?

"Andreas Hausladen" < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >writes:
Quote
>In addition, having Kylix based on Pascal was a good way to kill it.
>Pascal has little enough credibility in the Windows world and
>none at all in the Linux universe.
There was a Kylix C++, too.
By the time that was released, Kylix has the bad reputation,
both for stability, usability and price.
--
Seek simplicity and mistrust it.
Alfred Whitehead
A witty saying proves nothing.
Voltaire