Geoff,

Thank you for such an insightful post.

> Take a look at the product line (entitled "IDE") on the Borland
> website and pick the odd one out. Only a company as blind as
> Borland has been for many years could miss it! Even the news
> articles about the "spin-off" discuss it in reference to
> Borland's "IDEs" (which sort of leaves IB out in the cold).

Yeah, the web site organisation is silly. I suspect that grouping
Interbase in the "Develop" division has to do with the route to
market. I suspect a large part of Interbase sales happen via
distributors, the same distributors doing the IDE's.

The 3-way split remains a bit puzzling. They want to be company that
is centered on the needs of developers. The only way I can make sense
of it is if the plan is organised as ".Net", "Java" and "Web", which
are the three main current development area's. "Web" would be LAMP,
and stuff beyond that, such as Morfik's WebOS. It may be positioned
as something that scales from MS Access to Lotus Notes (to Google).

The other explanation is that the plan is clueless.

> As for what we can expect from DevCo in respect to IB... it
> seems likely to me that anyone interested in the rest of the
> product line will probably want to divest themselves of IB in
> fairly quick time.

That thought has crossed my mind too. If DevCo/IB can integrate with
the community and get itself some good momentum, it can spin-out this
group from DevCo. If current valuations of 20 times sales for open
source businesses that have their economics in order persist, a large
part of the initial investment can be recouped within 1, 2 years.

Paul