This pending article can do the small developer good, as it _may_ cause Inprise
to rethink its strategy to the small guy.  But, I aint holdin' my breath.

--
Wayne Herbert
Manager, Computer Products
Key Maps, Inc.
1411 West Alabama
Houston, TX  77006

Vox:  713.522.7949
Fax:  713.521.3202
Email:  wherb...@keymaps.com

Vyizder mororsiz assesden derizorsiz?

If they are not getting the message clear enough through this forum, they
certainly will not get it elsewhere.

Roger

(I will probably be labelled a TApologist for this, but it won't be the
first time and I don't care <g>).

Polly,

Since you are canvassing for comments from Delphi customers in the Inprise
newsgroups, I would like to respond:

First, I am one of your "barbarians" - I'm a self-employed contractor /
consultant trying to make a living. I've used Delphi since its inception
(I'm a co-author of an early Delphi book - The Delphi How-To) and previously
used Delphi's ancestor Pascal products for many years.

In your query to newsgroup members (quoted below) you ask two distinct
questions, one is about Inprise's recent corporate moves and one is
specifically about the latest Delphi release. You will, of course, receive
many different opinions on these questions, these are mine.

There has been a huge amount of discussion about the change in direction
that Inprise has taken and many customers have expressed a fear this change
will leave them without support - that Inprise will no longer care about the
'little" developers. I consider such fears to be without basis and
contradictory to the evidence. That isn't to say such fears should simply be
dismissed, that would be a mistake. It's important that Inprise try to
address those fears and, in fact, they have tried to do just that - most
recently at the Development Conference in Denver (a transcript of Del
Yokam's keynote is available at Inprise's web site and is worth reading in
this regard).

Borland has followed a very common progression over the last few years in
making a corporate recovery. First they identified where their strengths lay
(development tools), refocused their efforts there and found ways to divest
themselves of liabilities - areas where they could not profitably compete.
They then worked hard to re-establish themselves as a leader in those areas
by getting several new products out the door. Finally, they evaluated their
position in the marketplace and the industry and identified areas they could
fill that would take advantage of their existing products and expertise and
allow new growth. It is this last step that seems to be at issue.

It's possible they could survive by remaining the "simple" tools-developer
they've always been, but that is a limited market and would guarantee they
always stayed small and, as far as corporations were concerned, practically
invisible. Contrary to what some seem to believe, this course of action
would not serve "little guys" like me at all.  There is no way I would be
able to continue to make an independent living using their tools if they did
not address the needs and concerns of my potential customers.

If there was to be new growth then there had to be a new direction. This
simple statement is not even arguable. The choice to pursue corporate and
enterprise-level markets is not arguable either, we're at the beginning of a
huge growth  in this area and Inprise has put themselves into a great
position to grow along with it. By growing in this direction, they are
providing the best chance possible that I will be able to continue using
their tools for my work and allows me to grow my business (i.e. get more
high-level and lucrative contracts) using those same tools.

Inprise has tried to make it clear in both words and actions that their new
corporate direction is made possible by having a base of "Borland brand"
tools to offer those corporations and therefore continued development of
those tools is crucial to their continuing success. They have stated they
will continue to produce different versions of the tools to cater to
different levels of developers and they have backed these statements with
action such as retaining the name Borland for the tools themselves and
spinning off their retail marketing division into a separate entity that can
better manage the retail distribution of those tools (and I can vouch that
availability of the standard versions of their products in local stores is
much more obvious and steady than it has EVER been before). This tells me
they ARE trying to retain the confidence and patronage of all classes of
developers.

Now on to Delphi 4.

There have been many reports of various problems with this release - far
more than with previous releases, but it's important to keep in mind that
the majority of the problems concern the development environment (IDE)
rather than the compiler or any products produced with the tool.  It's
certainly true that these IDE bugs are annoying as hell and do effect one's
productivity and enjoyment in using the tool, but they are not
show-stoppers. There were also some bugs in various components, a couple of
them quite serious, but these typically have workarounds. Although it can
rightly be claimed that this is the least solid release thus far, It's also
important to give credit to Inprise for very quickly releasing a
downloadable update that does correct a great many of these bugs, and I
fully expect another update soon that will address most of what's left. It's
a safe bet Inprise isn't enjoying the negative publicity for this and will
endeavour to make amends in future releases.

As far as the compiler itself and the executables produced, it seems to be
at least as solid, if not even more so, than any previous release (all of
which have been extremely solid).  In this regard, there is simply NOTHING
stopping one from using Delphi 4 for production work.

--
Wayne Niddery - WinWright Consulting
Host of RADBooks at http://home.ican.net/~wniddery/RADBooks.html
Delphi, C++Builder, JBuilder, InterDev -- Amazon.com Associate