How to kill a product
Your reviewer was looking at what was wrong with Delphi, analyzed the scenarios, and wondered about it.
Feels like a massive delusion
Let me put this out of context and change topic to developing a house. Since many people buy houses, the value is in selling the picks, shovels and materials to build the house.
Business model:
a) Buy raw materials (computers, other software), tools (compiler, components, libraries) and people (developers) to build houses (applications).
b) Houses can be built from many different tools and raw materials. In similar fashion, they can be built using PHP, ASP (Software as a Service) and traditional brick & mortar (Delphi, C++).
c) The problem with Delphi, is the incredible amount of libraries being offered and ever-increasing costs. With other languages, they are free (PHP, Perl, Ruby, etc) or lower costs (Visual Studio)
Suppose you develop houses and the people started to get expensive and tools starts to get expensive. What happens next? You either start to save on people (reduce headcount) or tools (reduce tools to buy). The tool-vendors start to wise-up and start to introduce subscription model to make-up for lost monies.
With this subscription model:
a) You become at mercy of the vendors. While the vendors get annual income, to ensure good product, the complete opposite occurs. Many of them become complacent, don't bother too much to listen to customer issues, oh, features get introduced next year, so the subscription cycle continues.
b) They forget that anyone can cancel their subscription at any times. When they cancel, it's probably due to very poor product or in some cases, near-fraud-quality. If their product was based on normal sales and upgrade cycle, the product would perform much, much worse. (Hence the "whole subscription idea").
c) Most of the costs are getting ridiculous and more ridiculous. Delphi costs Euros 4,000. Step outside the box:
Reality vs. Delusion
Let's think outside the box. If the people are truly rich and successful, there would be many 3rd party paid offerings and continual developments...
- If someone can honestly say they can create a wonderful IntraWeb website, we would have hundreds of websites. and vibrant IntraWeb community, not some secretive newsgroup and not even a single person willing to vouch for an IntraWeb site. (Maybe it's because of the Serial Number embedded as a HTTP header on an IntraWeb site.)
- If someone can say they love Delphi, why can't they get a decent Delphi job? Or maybe an employer to offer Delphi jobs? Surely, if it is true, then Delphi must be some kind of wonderful "secret". Maybe in reality the people are bleeding money and Delphi developers cannot even find one single job near their place.
- When your reviewer told about "brotherly love" (not the gay kind, meaning, to give welfare to another person, such as, employing the Delphi developer even in hard times), your reviewer was looking and saw only him as one such person, when there are many in "other" non-Delphi communities. Hey buddy, can you spare me a job?
- When your reviewer talked about costs, everyone switches off their ears and only think benefits without thinking about costs. So when the application does not make much money, well, it's all Delphi 100% and we must use it. But wait. Who pays the bills if there is no money coming in? There's this big mortgage and big loan from the bank to pay off. Maybe living in a tent is a good idea.
- When someone criticizes about Delphi, remember many years ago, the same people were the ones who sold you thousands and thousands of dollar's worth of useless (and worthless) products, then now heap scorn on you. Remember that those who recommended many things now tell you are nothing but a worthless person who does not know how to program... but wait. Maybe it's the other way round. These fat greedy people are trying to "protect" their turf and do the same and same year in, year out. What's the difference?
- Can someone honestly tell why there are so many free 3rd party PHP scripts, Python, Perl scripts and why almost everything is pay-ware in Delphi? Maybe it's because oh, PHP is a crap language and full of garbage, or maybe Python and Perl is hard to understand... or maybe it's because the owners of Delphi have nothing to sell and keep increasing prices and prices. The cash-cow is nearly dead.
- Can someone honestly tell why Delphi developers are using PHP WordPress, PhpBB, Yabb, Inversion Board, VBulletin instead of pure 100% Delphi solution? Maybe it's because, oh, err, PHP is a better solution, Perl is a much better solution.
- Can someone honestly tell why I should accept poor documentation when PHP, Perl and others have excellent documentation? Maybe it's because they have hundreds of writers who can devote their time.
- Can someone honestly tell me why I should pay for a Delphi compiler to do open-source, when PHP, Perl, Visual Studio Express is free? I can download PHP, Perl, Ruby right now and not pay for it.
Hello World v2.0
Your reviewer was looking at the whole Delphi business model of subscriptions.
In order to develop one product, maybe thousands of dollar's worth of costs must be paid to develop it. What if the product fails? The vendors still want their money.
This subscription model will mean:
a) It becomes an annual 'fixed cost' with resale value of US$0. Suppose you buy a product at US$5,000 and after a year, it becomes US$0 cost and you have to buy it again and again every year. How would you feel?
b) The 3rd party vendors will get less and less money as they get squeezed out. Newer players cannot offer
c) Between Borland, components and manpower, magazines such as TDM, Delphi Magazine got squeezed out because there is not even a single cent for magazine subscription. The vendors, employees took all the money.
d) The ridiculous happened - Delphi 10 Handbook with advertisements from other vendors!
Is Delphi Dead?
So the essential question is: "Is Delphi Dead?". That question should be answered as: Do you want to enroll into multiple subscriptions to keep Delphi alive?
The day you stop paying is the day you stop getting updates. Maybe that's what Delphi feels like to many developers - that old dusty box on the shelf, with the developer who brought it paid for by half his life - all the subscriptions and payments could have gone into other things in life.
For those who criticize and offend the Delphi developers, their insults and personal attacks are recorderd forever on every newsgroup archives. There is no forgiveness, no redemption. Just google for "Simon Kissel" or "Frank De Groot" on Google groups or Tamaraka newsgroup archives for benefit of doubt.
Afterlife
Life after Delphi will mean cutting off all those subscriptions and separation from those hypocrites. Maybe it should be better that the new developers do not use Delphi at all, to spare them of all this torture.
Your reviewer was looking at what was wrong with Delphi, analyzed the scenarios, and wondered about it.
Feels like a massive delusion
Let me put this out of context and change topic to developing a house. Since many people buy houses, the value is in selling the picks, shovels and materials to build the house.
Business model:
a) Buy raw materials (computers, other software), tools (compiler, components, libraries) and people (developers) to build houses (applications).
b) Houses can be built from many different tools and raw materials. In similar fashion, they can be built using PHP, ASP (Software as a Service) and traditional brick & mortar (Delphi, C++).
c) The problem with Delphi, is the incredible amount of libraries being offered and ever-increasing costs. With other languages, they are free (PHP, Perl, Ruby, etc) or lower costs (Visual Studio)
Suppose you develop houses and the people started to get expensive and tools starts to get expensive. What happens next? You either start to save on people (reduce headcount) or tools (reduce tools to buy). The tool-vendors start to wise-up and start to introduce subscription model to make-up for lost monies.
With this subscription model:
a) You become at mercy of the vendors. While the vendors get annual income, to ensure good product, the complete opposite occurs. Many of them become complacent, don't bother too much to listen to customer issues, oh, features get introduced next year, so the subscription cycle continues.
b) They forget that anyone can cancel their subscription at any times. When they cancel, it's probably due to very poor product or in some cases, near-fraud-quality. If their product was based on normal sales and upgrade cycle, the product would perform much, much worse. (Hence the "whole subscription idea").
c) Most of the costs are getting ridiculous and more ridiculous. Delphi costs Euros 4,000. Step outside the box:
Reality vs. Delusion
Let's think outside the box. If the people are truly rich and successful, there would be many 3rd party paid offerings and continual developments...
- If someone can honestly say they can create a wonderful IntraWeb website, we would have hundreds of websites. and vibrant IntraWeb community, not some secretive newsgroup and not even a single person willing to vouch for an IntraWeb site. (Maybe it's because of the Serial Number embedded as a HTTP header on an IntraWeb site.)
- If someone can say they love Delphi, why can't they get a decent Delphi job? Or maybe an employer to offer Delphi jobs? Surely, if it is true, then Delphi must be some kind of wonderful "secret". Maybe in reality the people are bleeding money and Delphi developers cannot even find one single job near their place.
- When your reviewer told about "brotherly love" (not the gay kind, meaning, to give welfare to another person, such as, employing the Delphi developer even in hard times), your reviewer was looking and saw only him as one such person, when there are many in "other" non-Delphi communities. Hey buddy, can you spare me a job?
- When your reviewer talked about costs, everyone switches off their ears and only think benefits without thinking about costs. So when the application does not make much money, well, it's all Delphi 100% and we must use it. But wait. Who pays the bills if there is no money coming in? There's this big mortgage and big loan from the bank to pay off. Maybe living in a tent is a good idea.
- When someone criticizes about Delphi, remember many years ago, the same people were the ones who sold you thousands and thousands of dollar's worth of useless (and worthless) products, then now heap scorn on you. Remember that those who recommended many things now tell you are nothing but a worthless person who does not know how to program... but wait. Maybe it's the other way round. These fat greedy people are trying to "protect" their turf and do the same and same year in, year out. What's the difference?
- Can someone honestly tell why there are so many free 3rd party PHP scripts, Python, Perl scripts and why almost everything is pay-ware in Delphi? Maybe it's because oh, PHP is a crap language and full of garbage, or maybe Python and Perl is hard to understand... or maybe it's because the owners of Delphi have nothing to sell and keep increasing prices and prices. The cash-cow is nearly dead.
- Can someone honestly tell why Delphi developers are using PHP WordPress, PhpBB, Yabb, Inversion Board, VBulletin instead of pure 100% Delphi solution? Maybe it's because, oh, err, PHP is a better solution, Perl is a much better solution.
- Can someone honestly tell why I should accept poor documentation when PHP, Perl and others have excellent documentation? Maybe it's because they have hundreds of writers who can devote their time.
- Can someone honestly tell me why I should pay for a Delphi compiler to do open-source, when PHP, Perl, Visual Studio Express is free? I can download PHP, Perl, Ruby right now and not pay for it.
Hello World v2.0
Your reviewer was looking at the whole Delphi business model of subscriptions.
In order to develop one product, maybe thousands of dollar's worth of costs must be paid to develop it. What if the product fails? The vendors still want their money.
This subscription model will mean:
a) It becomes an annual 'fixed cost' with resale value of US$0. Suppose you buy a product at US$5,000 and after a year, it becomes US$0 cost and you have to buy it again and again every year. How would you feel?
b) The 3rd party vendors will get less and less money as they get squeezed out. Newer players cannot offer
c) Between Borland, components and manpower, magazines such as TDM, Delphi Magazine got squeezed out because there is not even a single cent for magazine subscription. The vendors, employees took all the money.
d) The ridiculous happened - Delphi 10 Handbook with advertisements from other vendors!
Is Delphi Dead?
So the essential question is: "Is Delphi Dead?". That question should be answered as: Do you want to enroll into multiple subscriptions to keep Delphi alive?
The day you stop paying is the day you stop getting updates. Maybe that's what Delphi feels like to many developers - that old dusty box on the shelf, with the developer who brought it paid for by half his life - all the subscriptions and payments could have gone into other things in life.
For those who criticize and offend the Delphi developers, their insults and personal attacks are recorderd forever on every newsgroup archives. There is no forgiveness, no redemption. Just google for "Simon Kissel" or "Frank De Groot" on Google groups or Tamaraka newsgroup archives for benefit of doubt.
Afterlife
Life after Delphi will mean cutting off all those subscriptions and separation from those hypocrites. Maybe it should be better that the new developers do not use Delphi at all, to spare them of all this torture.
3 comments:
You are (sadly) right in every aspect, I agree 100% with you with everything said on this blog.
These greedy motherf**kers (Borland, Inprise, Codegear, now Embarcadero) [nearly] killed our beloved tool, that soon will be really dead by a simple reason... there will be no more Delphi programmers left.
Just look at trends for "Delphi":
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Delphi&cmpt=q
Delphi is not dying, it's "dead", at least for much of the programming world. Ask a dev who's been in the business for less than 5 years and they've NEVER EVEN HEARD OF DELPHI. In that respect, it belongs in a category with PowerBuilder and dBase.
The real question is, what replaces it? IMHO, Delphi has never really embraced the fact that they are only good for a niche: a competitor to Visual C++ for writing desktop Windows applications. Not desktop Mac applications or desktop Linux applications, or application servers, or (for the love of god) web servers. It's not good for any of those things and frankly never will be and shouldn't be. When Borland/Inprise started trying to turn it into all these other things is when the whole thing went off the rails. It all reminds me of the old saying: "a man who has only a hammer sees all his problems as nails." Borland/Inprise needed to get more tools, not try to make their hammer do everything.
But I digress. For the vast majority of us who are still using Delphi (all 12 of us), we are using it to write Win32 desktop apps. Unicode was a step in the right direction, but not what we really wanted. What we really wanted was 64 bit - something that could likely be provided without a ton of problems if they would just dump all the shit features in Delphi that are used by that guy (and you know who you are) and which it was never the right tool for anyway (seriously, if you're doing web development, use a web development tool like PHP or ASP.NET or Ruby on Rails, or (if you absolutely must, but I'd like your address so I can mail you some Anthrax) Java.
But 64 bit support is not going to happen before the last few Delphi devs become something else. So the next question is what replaces it?
.NET/c# and Winforms? Meh, it's ok to develop in (frankly STILL not as high productivity as Delphi for many things, even today) but have you ever supported a widely distributed consumer desktop app that is based on .NET? I have and it sucks the llama's ass. Consumer support is bad enough without introducing .NET framework installation issues into the mix.
Visual C++? God, I want to get the damned thing finished while there's actually still a market for it and don't want to spend the next 5 years troubleshooting memory leaks and bizarre crashes in the product. C++ is a dinosaur and needs to go away far more than Delphi does. The only thing more annoying than C++ is C++ developers.
For small, consumer desktop apps (which, admittedly is a dying category), there simply still isn't a better choice than Delphi. If there was, BELIEVE ME I would be using it as I'm not in love with having my business based on a dying development language.
What is the point of this site? If you hate Delphi, move on - Use Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc. If you don't, then don't move on. But apparently you have too much time on your hands. You should be busy making money with the time you spend on this blog. I'm happily making money with Delphi, thank you very much.
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