plinehan wrote:

>
> Profit = Loser was the motto of those glorious
> halcyon days.
>

And InterBase was profitable, but not growing madly
and the database industry as a whole didn't show
wild growth.

>
>
>>Borland's intention in open
>>sourcing InterBase was to ... rake in
>>millions.
>
>
> OK, but *_why_* did it decide to Open Source
> Interbase if this was a sure fire way of making
> money. By that logic, they could have made even
> more money opensourcing Delphi, JBuilder, BCPPB,
> hell, every product in the company.

Delphi was their core business. This was a flier into
a new (risky) strategy. At the same time they were trying
to sell themselves to Corel and couldn't divest themselves
of their primary assets. JBuilder was Java, which was
hot, so that wasn't a candidate.

>
> Why Interbase in particular?

Low growth, non-core business. A lot of the most
profitable InterBase business was outside of Borland's
competence - proprietary Unix platforms. They really
never understood the non-PC market.

> Did Borland
> see an opportunity to divest itself of a
> millstone around their neck, and make
> some money at the same time?

Their feeling about a slowly growing profitable
division changed a lot between December 1999 and
late April 2000. The first of the dot com busts
started in April and the stock market began to be
more skeptical. It wasn't the end for companies
that were already going, but it was too late to
start.

> Or was that just Europe (i.e. date of burst)?

No, this was all US.

Cheers,


Ann