> What was the rationale behind "sunsetting" IB?

Profitability. There was a major analysis of all of
Borland's products in terms of what they did, market
share, costs etc. Some products were profitable, some
were loss leaders, some were not. By making some products
more profitable. killing off others then Borland could
potentially turn a profit rather than a loss...

> "Unh, no." - I dunno, or "Unh, no." - I can't
> say? Are there any figures out there from
> which one can glean any sort of idea about
> annual sales and breakdowns of same?

1. There are no figures out there, Borland calculates
its public P&L on all revenue, costs etc
2. Internally yes they have the figures, hence the
concept of Business Units within Borland, this
was a mechanism introduced to accurately calculate
the P&L of a specific product or product family
3. InterBase was the first to become a BU. Mainly
because it has previously been operating an a
subsidiary to Borland as a company in its own right
so has the necessary infrastructure in place to do this.
4. I know the figures for a many years.
5. But I can't share them. Regardless of what you read
or hear InterBase was profitable and returning a good
margin.

> IB is the only (and still is AFAICS) the only
> db which comes with its own set of components
> in the IDE.

The original components that appeared were other
database friendly. A concerted effort by the InterBase
team was made on the various developers in the tools
arena responsible for the data aware components to
lift their capability for InterBase. This worked
a bit, sort of. But not enough.
Then third party components were written aka
Greg Deatz's stuff and IBO. A decision was then
made to take a set of 3rd party components, bring
them in-house and enhance them specifically for
InterBase and make them available. This was initially
done by an InterBase R&D Engineer and
finished by Jeff Overcash.

> One idea that has constantly nagged me is why
> they didn't do the same for the biggies like
> Oracle, M$oft, Sybase and others - kind of a
> plugin type of concept where you bung in db
> components for your db of choice. I know that

They didn't need to. The components worked
fine for the above. Since the components were
architected that way.

> afterthought - i.e. Ashton-Tate, who then
> resold to another company for which the
> db was also not core, i.e. Borland.

Actually from memory AT has big plans for InterBase, but
Borland bought them before anything happened.
Think next version of dBASE.

At the time of the acquistion Philippe Khan referred to
InterBase as the "Jewel in the Crown", and intitially
there was significant effort by Borland to move
InterBase, problem was they didn't know how to do it, and
weren't in it for the long run.

> So, the $64.000 question. What are the
> financials of IBPhoenix like? Do you have
> to register them? If so, what were they for
> last year? How many employees? Revenue?
> Expenditure? Profit/Loss? Or just point
> me to a web site where I can get this
> info.

UK Companies House. InterBase Software Ltd
Registration number 4006743. Enjoy.

Suffice it to say, we earn just enough money to
pay the people who work for the company enough
to live on.. and things are slowly improving.
Unlike 4 years ago.

IBPhoenix Types are:

Paul Beach
Ann Harrison (Jim Starkey)
Paul Reeves
Pavel Cisar
Helen Borrie
Dimitrios Ionnnadis

Paul