Friday, October 2, 2009

Website Obituary: MaxComponents.net

MaxComponents review

Going, going, ...
MaxComponents on their website, dated 31st August 2009 they were leaving the Delphi business on 31st December 2009. DelphiHater hopes they leave and close down. Why bother running a losing business and make losses every year? Maybe Java and NET developers have it better...

Magic Numbers
There are an estimated 1.75* million Delphi Developers but unfortunately, none of them have enough money to spend to keep MaxComponents afloat and hence, MaxComponents are doing the right thing - stop Delphi development, close the business and for the owners, lay off the Delphi developers who work for them, re-think what went wrong and probably find new jobs.

* Michael Swindell, VP for Products and Stragegy at CodeGear

MaxComponents joins other companies - AHM (Alexander Melhorn) of TritonTrools, BuyPin (BuPack), ObjectiveSoftware Ltd (ABC Components) who have stopped developing libraries for Delphi, simply because the money was not there.

For those Delphi developers who cannot understand this, why not make a fund so that Delphi developers "donate" some money every month and give to this company? Or give some Delphi remote tasks to this company? Or maybe support them financially by buying their components and programs? Or give them a few thousand dollars (preferably interest-free and debt-free) money every month to survive...

There are 1.75 million developers. Say, only 50% are interested, so that leaves appox 500,000 developers who are willing to pay for . If 500,000 developers pay US$50, MaxComponents would be US$2,500,000 dollars richer.

The reality is, there are not 1.75 million developers. According to BlaisePascal Magazine, they give conservative 10% of the Delphi community(1) interested in their Magazine. 10% of 1.75 million is only 175,000 developers.

DelphiHater thinks 0.01% of 1.75 million Delphi developers are active developers willing to pay money. That 0.01% of 1.75 million gives quite reasonable numbers - 17,500 developers. That would translate well into BlaisePascal's 2000 Subscriptions(1) and approx 16,000 maximum downloads(1).

1) Estimated readers are 10% of Pascal and Delphi Community
http://www.blaisepascal.eu/index.php?actie=advertprices/priceinform

Quickly Reviewing E.S.T. Help Author Pro.
Your reviewer sees it's TRichViewEdit (TRichViewEdit, TRvRuler, TRvStyle, TRichViewActions) components with Toolbar2000 (TTbxbutton, TTbxToolbar) components from DelphiGems (TVirtalTreeView), and Addict Spell Checker made into an EXE file.

E.S.T. Help Author Pro lacks PDF support, Style Support. It does not work on Vista and XP (crashes under non-administrator mode).

[Your reviewer thinks:
If anyone buys TRichView, Toolbar2000, Addict Spell checker, and write Help Authoring Tool, maybe they will share the same fate?]

Quickly Reviewing mxLicense.
MxLicense does not have any EXE or binary copy protection facilities. 'Nuff said.

Quickly Reviewing TmxSideBarPro
Not much value. There are plenty of Outlook bars in the Delphi market.

The freeware are not worth reviewing. They are not updated to Delphi 2009 and no new developments for quite some time.

Loss and Gain
Your reviewer thinks the owners would gain much more by quitting and laying off all the Delphi Developers under their care and find a regular C# or Java job. The owners could make more money from C# or Java as an employee than just Delphi-alone employer (who have to pay the bills).

:)

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