Comment by mamcx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mamcx | Hacker News Reader

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> No amount of competitive pricing today is going to make a resurgence of Delphi happen.

I disagree. Delphi is still great, and with a less tone-deaf it could get very well.

Note that Delphi still have a healthy position today:

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

(Position 9, above Ruby! and others!)

(As much as we can debate about Tiobe and other indexs, is important to note that is still way higher that many will expect, and the flow of information we see in the community is very good, much more than many other hispers options)

The thing is that price is in fact the main problem. This kill the open source ecosystem options around it.

I will totally, like many others (I know, I'm moderator in on of the most important forum in Latin-America) work more for it but without a way to reach a large audience it kill many ideas we have.

Delphi was the most sucesfully opensource but commercial (as, you have the source) with many thirdy-party options. Think like the current React-Components market but maybe larger and years ago.

I think any company that would buy Delphi will agree more with me than with you.

If you're right and companies just can't see that or make it work, can the community do more with Lazarus? I have not played with that so I don't know how good it is.

Most companies will ruin any language, specially if you get into the idea that is for sell as in the 90s. No way this could work today.

We (the community) have tell Borland and sub-sequent owners exactly what to do, and have been never been heared.

To see why it failed, read :

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail

In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yocam replied without hesitation "Absolutely."

This is it. Management trade a large and healthy ecosystem chasing the rainbows.

This will fail for sure.

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Lazarus is ok, except that suffer from the same disease of most open source projects: Lack of focus and good funding.

Because what you were telling them is wrong.

Look at every other Delphi competitor from the time period. Microsoft is giving Visual Studio away to casual users and Visual Basic is now VB.Net. Eclipse and IntelliJ come in free versions. There is no longer a market for a million loyal $100 customers for a programming language and ecosystem. There are too many high-quality free languages, compilers and IDEs to make that business model work anymore.

For a while it was true - it seemed like the OS IDEs would win, and _definitely_ no one would actually _pay_ for an IDE.

Until JetBrains came on to the scene.

There's a sort of a hobbyist/professional split. There's a lot of grey area inbetween, but it's easier to reason about it if you think of two markets. One will pay, one won't if there are acceptable free alternatives. But it turns out that there are rather big synergies to be had from both camps using versions of the same tooling. So you have enterprises that are willing to buy pro versions of tools at prices that subsidize the existence of users at the free tier. That's nothing like the old Borland model that the post I was responding to wants Delphi to go back to.

The appstore model is almost that.

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We know the old model will not apply here. That is clear. That is not what we have tell them.

What we have tell them is that the tool must have a opensource compiler, and free tier and a reasonable pro tier. Xamarin was a good sample.

Also, take in account that the millon loyal customer is not that unreasonable to find:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2418435/how-many-delphi-...

Just because Visual Studio can be free doesn't mean it's not selling for $5000 per license.

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