| Subject | RE: Interbase news |
|---|---|
| Author | Claudio Valderrama C. |
| Post date | 2000-02-10T00:10:13Z |
Those are good news!
At least for me.
A year ago, I proposed that Borland would end up being one unit with Corel.
I was deemed to be crazy. When the IB crisis started, I wrote in some
newsgroup that probably Corel might be in charge of IB. I was tagged silly.
It seems I was not 100% in the wrong track.
I'm not a market analyst and I don't have proficiency for that. But you may
remember some weird fate of Borland:
- The company that started successfully in 1983 was fading slowly until in
1990 (approx, don't remember well), there were rumors of a
Borland/WordPerfect merger. The event never happened and WP was absorbed by
Novell.
- Short after that, Borland sold QPro to Novell. Novell never could
capitalize on its N-Office and the only real effect was the loss of market
share for both WP and QP.
- In 1995, Borland was in trouble when Delphi appeared. It was the
opportunity for a large breath. However, the flagship product, Borland C++
5.0 (despite its better IDE than the MSVC IDE) was a sales disaster, Gary
Wetsel resigned and these were agony times.
- When Novell gave up and sold the package to Corel, they received a buggy
and slow Office suite, but Corel had the muscle to prevent it from dying.
- Then Borland took another step and sold Paradox to Corel. So, Corel-Office
was completed with a word processor, destop database, presentations program
and spreadsheet. The only problem is Corel distributed a customized version
of the BDE that broke almost any already installed BDE.
- As part of the agreement, Corel received rights to use the BDE, so the
companies were linked in some subtle ways.
- Although Del Yocam may have saved the company from bankruptcy, IMHO he
missed the track at some point in time: changing Borland to Inprise only to
spawn Borland again and absorb ISC is a tale that speaks of a clueless man.
Borland is not Apple. It seems Mr. Yocan forgot that basic fact. Perhaps his
better contribution was to envision the future is more in services than in
developmnent tools.
- After years of being bashed by Microsoft in the tools arena, Borland
received 100 million dollars from M$ in exchange for technology licenses.
Also, this may be seen has a way of Gates to say to Borland "continue
developing products in the Windows platform now that Linux doesn't allow me
to sleep".
- Borland stocks have good level perhaps due to the ability of Mr. Fuller,
but it's clear the company in the long term couldn't be assured to survive.
- Corel has proven to have the muscle to support and keep alive its products
(a thing that Borland misses) and so the merger can bring better marketing
insight.
- Dale Fuller is capable of managing hard issues and gain a good position.
Look at how he controlled the Interbase fire: instead of simply stopping the
product or donating the IB6 binaries, he decided to make source code
available and get more money on stocks. It seems in these days investors go
to a search engine and type "Open Source" then click on any link in the
result oage and put money here.
- I don't see any important trend in my country, but in the US the frenzy
seems to be "let's merge now or die". However, for me a merge is one where
the new company has a new name or a composed name. Here, Corel remains Corel
and hence this merger has the taste of an absorption: Corel swallowed
Inprise.
So, be prepared to see in the next version of Delphi the Corel Draw instead
of the Image Editor.
;-)
C.
At least for me.
A year ago, I proposed that Borland would end up being one unit with Corel.
I was deemed to be crazy. When the IB crisis started, I wrote in some
newsgroup that probably Corel might be in charge of IB. I was tagged silly.
It seems I was not 100% in the wrong track.
I'm not a market analyst and I don't have proficiency for that. But you may
remember some weird fate of Borland:
- The company that started successfully in 1983 was fading slowly until in
1990 (approx, don't remember well), there were rumors of a
Borland/WordPerfect merger. The event never happened and WP was absorbed by
Novell.
- Short after that, Borland sold QPro to Novell. Novell never could
capitalize on its N-Office and the only real effect was the loss of market
share for both WP and QP.
- In 1995, Borland was in trouble when Delphi appeared. It was the
opportunity for a large breath. However, the flagship product, Borland C++
5.0 (despite its better IDE than the MSVC IDE) was a sales disaster, Gary
Wetsel resigned and these were agony times.
- When Novell gave up and sold the package to Corel, they received a buggy
and slow Office suite, but Corel had the muscle to prevent it from dying.
- Then Borland took another step and sold Paradox to Corel. So, Corel-Office
was completed with a word processor, destop database, presentations program
and spreadsheet. The only problem is Corel distributed a customized version
of the BDE that broke almost any already installed BDE.
- As part of the agreement, Corel received rights to use the BDE, so the
companies were linked in some subtle ways.
- Although Del Yocam may have saved the company from bankruptcy, IMHO he
missed the track at some point in time: changing Borland to Inprise only to
spawn Borland again and absorb ISC is a tale that speaks of a clueless man.
Borland is not Apple. It seems Mr. Yocan forgot that basic fact. Perhaps his
better contribution was to envision the future is more in services than in
developmnent tools.
- After years of being bashed by Microsoft in the tools arena, Borland
received 100 million dollars from M$ in exchange for technology licenses.
Also, this may be seen has a way of Gates to say to Borland "continue
developing products in the Windows platform now that Linux doesn't allow me
to sleep".
- Borland stocks have good level perhaps due to the ability of Mr. Fuller,
but it's clear the company in the long term couldn't be assured to survive.
- Corel has proven to have the muscle to support and keep alive its products
(a thing that Borland misses) and so the merger can bring better marketing
insight.
- Dale Fuller is capable of managing hard issues and gain a good position.
Look at how he controlled the Interbase fire: instead of simply stopping the
product or donating the IB6 binaries, he decided to make source code
available and get more money on stocks. It seems in these days investors go
to a search engine and type "Open Source" then click on any link in the
result oage and put money here.
- I don't see any important trend in my country, but in the US the frenzy
seems to be "let's merge now or die". However, for me a merge is one where
the new company has a new name or a composed name. Here, Corel remains Corel
and hence this merger has the taste of an absorption: Corel swallowed
Inprise.
So, be prepared to see in the next version of Delphi the Corel Draw instead
of the Image Editor.
;-)
C.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nick Lothian [mailto:Lothian.Nicholas@...]
> Sent: Lunes 7 de Febrero de 2000 19:08
> To: IBDI@onelist.com
> Subject: [IBDI] Interbase news
>
>
> From: "Nick Lothian" <Lothian.Nicholas@...>
>
> The Interbase v6 project will be hosted on SourceForge.net
> (interbase.sourceforge.net)
>
> This is a open source project hosting service run by VA Linux.
>
> After an emails to the email address of Dale Fuller (who actually
> is is Dale
> Fuller!) and to a guy at VA Linux I received an email from Larry Augustin
> (the founder/owner of VA Linux) confirming that it was for real.
>
> To summarise the information on that page, and from knowledge of
> SourceForge
> we now know:
>
> Good Things:
> The licence will be MPL (Mozilla Public Licence)
> The version control system will be CVS (provided by Sourceforge)
> Full (web based) bug tracking is supplied
> Mailing lists already exist
>
> Bed Thing:
> There isn't any source there yet. (I checked)
> There is still no release date.
>
> I don't know how this will be affected by Borland/Corel merger, though
> (http://www.borland.com/about/press/2000/inprise_corel.html)
>
> Regards
> Nick Lothian