In Firebird-general@yahoogroups.com,
"Ann W. Harrison" <aharrison@i...> 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.

OK - rational explanation as to why IB might have
been the choice to get the chop. It was "doing
quite nicely thank you", but wasn't generating
the return on input that was being demanded
of IT firm managers in the glory days, and
furthermore, nobody could figure out a way
to make IB a big enough loser of money so
that it was perceived that it was riding the
right wave - in surf-dude speak?

> > 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.

I see - and thanks again for a decent explication.
You're basically saying that Borland was trying
to run with the "dot-com, internet-thang", but
didn't know which ball to choose, so chose
IB because it might (while still profitable
going forward) not have been the brighest
star in their galaxy?

> At the same time they were trying
> to sell themselves to Corel and couldn't
> divest themselves of their primary assets.

OK, point taken again. They couldn't sell
themselves as a going concern if they'd
got rid of *_every_* product - it was a
question of making a choice. Mind you,
I would have hardly considered IB as
a secondary asset. Do you know (and are
you in a position to say?) what sort of
money was being spent and made by the
Interbase division of Borland/Inprise
at the time?

> JBuilder was Java, which was
> hot, so that wasn't a candidate.

Of course ("Doh", slaps forehead, reaches for Duff),
anything with the word "Java" (and/or "XML", "n-tier"
and "client-driven") would have been a complete
no-no for sale. To much to be made by pumping
the dot-com well there! It's all starting to fall
into place - thanks for taking the time to
put together your reply.

> > 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.

Yes - indeed that's probably the one point I left
out of the original post to comp.databases.oracle.
server where I was defending IB/FB and trying to
explain why (despite its superior locking model)
it never made it to the big time. I made some points
about Borland being caught up in the desktop
db wars and not trying hard enough to market
IB as a *_REAL PROPER_* db solution in its own
right, and also its focus was on development tools
and not db's per se (unlike, say, Oracle, who only
had a db). I am immodest enough to suggest that
you'd like the post that I wrote so here's the URL

http://groups.google.com/group/
comp.databases.oracle.server/
browse_frm/thread/2670caeb2f80c3ff/
35fea96bc782948a?lnk=st&q=Interbase+group
:comp.databases.oracle.server+author
:paul@...&rnum=1&hl=en#35fea96bc782948a

I would love if you could let me know if there
are any howlers in there! Basically, I say that
Borland were saying to clients something like
"TurboPascal/Delphi can work with any db, and,
oh, yeah, we have one that you might consider...".

> > 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.

Makes sense, at least where I'm from with an IPO
in Oct 2000.

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

> No, this was all US.

Normally, it doesn't take financial markets in
Europe that long (hours is the usual scale)
to react to trends in Merka. Curious.


<Kow-tow>

As the Arch-Doyenne of IB/FB, I would be grateful
if you could contribute your opinion to the
debate between Paul Ruizendaal and myself over
what is a good/reasonable metric for the analysis
of db penetration in a given marketplace.

I maintain that job-offers is the only metric
that can hold any water given that we have
no way of properly analysing figures even
from companies like MySQL which only have
one product, never mind Borland or M$oft
which have several.

Your opinion respectfully awaited.

</Kow-tow>



Paul...

> Ann