May the Schwartz be with you

Mr. David Schwartz let out a nice rant on the Embarcadero newsgroups:

Mr. David Schwartz writes:They've been running promotions regularly since before XE was launched.

Subscribe to the Programmer's Paradise list and you'll hear about their promotions directly.

I don't recall getting anything directly from Embarcadero either, although I have gotten a few phone calls from someone in their sales Dept.

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Their pricing and marketing strategy still baffles me, even with the "Starter Edition".

Microsoft has a licensing policy whereby if you're working for someone, you can run a copy on your own computer at home and/or laptop.

The cost of MSDN, which gets you almost everything MS produces, is also less than the cost of any "professional" versions of Delphi, C++, Prism, etc.

I haven't found any "real work" for 16 months. I'm not homeless only because of the kindness of my landlord. The only Delphi jobs I've seen are to maintain D5/D6/D7 code while they port it over to .NET or Java. And I seem to be competing with people here on H-1B visas who are willing to accept $20/hr through job shops who say their clients won't pay more than $25/hr.

It's a horrible job market, and Embarcadero wants me to spend my own money -- money I don't have to spend -- to learn a product that nobody who'd hire me even cares that I know.

I have an interview set up with a company next week that has software in thousands of sites around the country, and it's all running D6. My contact told me that it's cost-prohibitive for them to upgrade to a newer version of Delphi for some reason. In fact, their clients are all still running Windows XP.

This is the same story as the past five contracts I've had since 2005.

There's zero ROI there for me to keep current. Actually, it's negative.

When I talk about the newest versions of Delphi with people at these companies, they want to know how much experience I've got with it. Well, uhhh.... I don't have the funds to buy it just so I can learn it and ultimately help Embarcadero sell it into Corporate accounts that they already can't convince to upgrade.

I print out and show them the product feature matrix PDFs, but ... so what? They can pick up the phone and have a handful of resumes within a week of people who've got plenty of experience with the latest .NET/C# stuff. But they can't find decent Delphi developers at all.

Ironically, if I wanted, I could probably get a legitimate copy of MSDN for free somewhere, including directly from Microsoft.

Borland/CodeGear/Embarcadero has never made much of an effort to get their products into the hands of the people who have the greatest influence in making sales, namely independent consultants, contractors, and people who just want to stay current with things. The "Starter Edition" is an interesting attempt, but ... the net effect is it simply allows me to speak authoritatively to clients in order to get them to buy a bigger package with more bells and whistles in it. And my experience is that when they compare the price vs. MSDN or just Visual Studio, they politely thank me and that's the end of the discussion.

There's no line-item in a budget for "savings due to productivity". They only believe the productivity claims AFTER they've seen them with their own eyes. Other than that, it's just a "big risk" -- a more expensive package from a company that's got a reputation of being 2 years behind the technology curve with buggy software.

Embarcadero says they're changing that. But what they're NOT changing is ensuring that the troops on the ground who walk into companies using old versions of Delphi can say, "I've been working with the latest versions since they were in Beta and I know all of their kinks". Most of the consultants I've run into say that about .NET and C#, but not a single one says that about Delphi. Why? "I'm not spending MY OWN MONEY to help CodeGear sell their products. If a client wants me to use the latest version, they can pay for it."

That's never an issue with Microsoft's tools. Or Apple's tools.

The new "Starter Edition" is supposed to give you a way to afford the product when you're "getting started". It requires you to buy an upgrade after you've hit $1000 in "gross revenues", which if your business is not built around software development, is a silly meaningless number. Anyway, every penny of that $1000 will have to be saved up to pay for the upgrade rather than your rent and marketing.

It would be great to know who's using Delphi XE so I can talk to them about some work. But the latest version I've seen discussed in job ads over the past year is D2006, and that's been very rare.

I'd love to be working with the newest version of Delphi. But it's a chicken-and-egg problem: I need to find a company who'll foot the bill FIRST, which isn't likely to happen because nobody I talk to is using it. And without it, I can't convince them it's a smart buying decision.

BTW, Apple's entire development platform was FREE, until they started charging ... OMG ... $99!

And THAT is to get registered in their Developer's program that lets you get keys to submit apps to their App Store.

Since they instituted their $99 fee, Apple has sold over a BILLION DOLLARS worth of apps through their App Store, the vast majority of which sell for under $5 a pop.

Is it just me, or is there a very suspicious inverse correlation between the price of these development platforms and the size of their developer base?

Embarcadero should figure out a way to get a copy of RAD Studio XE into the hands of every single software contractor and developer they can find, with the proviso that they ONLY USE IT FOR PERSONAL STUFF -- as a "learning tool" so to speak. These are the people in a position to motivate sales and use within these corporations who are still stuck in D6 land. The net cost to them is ... a download. These are not people who'd buy the product, but they CAN and DO influence sales. Maybe charge $99 for it. But don't expect these guys to upgrade after they get a job or get their employer to upgrade!

-David
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