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Comment by Svip | Hacker News Reader

Having worked professionally with Pascal/Delphi for 10 years, it is quite apparent that no one in the industry expects new young companies to build a whole new product from the ground up in Delphi.

This view is reflected in Embarcadero's pricing models. They are not interested in new users, they are just interested in milking those remaining in the Delphi ecosystem for money until those businesses all liquidate or move on.

I used to be far more optimistic about Delphi and its future, but over those 10 years, I grew far more pessimistic. Delphi was really ahead of its time in the 1990s, but has now been overtaken by everyone, and still stuck in a software development world that no longer exists. It's sad, really.

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Not sure if it’s necessarily an accurate comparison, but Embarcadero's strategy of purchasing a well loved product then commercializing it to the point where the only people who would ever buy it are large organizations with a legacy of the tool almost feels reminiscent of Oracle.

It is. Because they are now a part if Idera, whose entire raison d'etre is to buy declining technologies and milk them for their licenses.

Among other notable acquisitions under Idera's belt: Sencha (ExtJS), Travis CI, Whole Tomato

That's Broadcom's strategy as well. They buy mature products, cut out the small customers, and try to cross-sell their large customers onto other parts of their portfolio. Seems to have worked for them, up 60% from pre-pandemic highs when they bought Symantec Enterprise.

MicroFocus is also in that kind of business

Or it might be that Delphi (aka desktop application development) just was at a dead-end and this is an accurate reflection of the costs of end-of-life maintenance/development. Compare to other software projects that just get cancelled or thrown to the open source graveyard when profitability takes a hit, there are worse ways to go.

OTOH it's not so expensive for a professional tool. I paid the same for a game engine. Not having a free tier is a hard choice (I got into programming largely because of an early version of Delphi having a free tier), but it's one that they actively made presumably for some kind of reason.

FWIW Delphi being ridiculously expensive for non-enterprise users was something they started back in early 2000s, long before Borland/Inprise/CodeGear was bought by Embarcadero. IIRC the last Delphi you could buy for cheap was Delphi 5 Standard for $99. In Delphi 6 (when they started going hard into enterprise stuff) the $99 tier was for Delphi 6 Personal which was only for non-commercial applications and by Delphi 2005 (2-3 versions later) the cheapest price was ~$500 (the free stuff was dropped, there was a free "Turbo Delphi" later but it was very limited and was based on one of the worst versions of the IDE and was discontinued - this "give some version for free only to take it away and not support it in the future" was also something that kept people away from Delphi even when CodeGear/Embarcadero/etc tried to give free stuff).

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