Category Archives: Business

Kylix, Borland, and the calendar

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Or, “Borland misses another release date.”

Those of us who have been programming for many years have developed a love/hate relationship with Borland. On the one hand, they have come up with some incredibly useful and long-lived tools; I’ve been using Borland languages for, quite literally, decades. Delphi is my development environment of choice for Windows. And whatever they may be, Borland isn’t the Evil Empire of Microsoft. But on the the other hand, they’ve gone through some tough times– in an attempt to become profitable, they sold off most of their product line and nearly went under. They reorganized, renamed themselves to “Inprise” and came back from the brink. Recently they’ve reorganized again, and gone back to the original Borland name.

A couple of years ago, they announced their latest product, Kylix, which is a native development environment for Linux; basically, Delphi for Linux. It was publicly demoed, with much fanfare, and it was to ship in mid-2000. No one really expected that, and in July 2000, at the BorCon here in San Diego, Mike Swindell (the Kylix product manager) told me personally that the it would be shipping “before the end of the year.”

Towards the end of the year, it became obvious that they wouldn’t make that release date either, and extended the timeline to “release in first quarter 2001.” However, at that time, rumblings in the newsgroups were that there were still some very significant flaws. One of the beta testers who shall remain nameless (the NDA is pretty draconian) told me personally that he hadn’t been able to compile any apps that run reliably. This has been a problem all along– a very simple app that Mike demoed in San Diego locked up. (Talk about embarrassing moments!)

Now first quarter 2001 has come and gone, and you still can’t buy the thing. This has me terrifically bummed. Kylix, if it ever works and gets released, has the potential to change the Linux world overnight. Public perception of Linux is that it’s only for nerds and techies. To some extent, that’s true. But if even 10% of the Delphi apps out there get compiled and distributed in Kylix, it will outnumber all the apps that have ever been released for Linux in all other languages combined.

And every kid and college programmer out there who hacks on Delphi in Windows can hack on Kylix in Linux instead. That could be the boost the Linux really needs to move it from a niche operating system out into the mainstream.

But it can’t happen until they release the product.

Goodbye Napster

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It looks like the end is near: Napster to Begin Blocking Copyrighted Songs

[T]he wildly popular online song swap service would begin blocking access to some one million copyrighted songs this weekend as part of its effort to conform with an injunction expected at any time[…]

That doesn’t appear to have happened yet. I, and 11,104 other users, are currently connected and sharing 2,125,697 files (9,034 gigs.) And yes, I’m downloading just as fast as my DSL line can pull stuff in.

My feeling is that music sharing will temporarily devolve into a feudal model, with “guilds” of people who have similar tastes in music, banding together in a less-public venue. These guilds will continue to exist, adding and changing members, until some unifying event occurs that makes the “servent” [server-client] technology work as well as Napster does/did.

Currently it looks like that unifying event will be based on the Gnutella protocol. So far today, two different friends have sent me two different programs that both operate on the Gnutella model. One of them, Bearshare, I’ve been playing with for a while, but I haven’t tried the new beta. The other is called iMesh, and I’d never even heard of it before.

All of these programs are quirky (and let’s face it: Napster is too) but if every computer is a servent, it’s going to be darn near impossible to shut down.

The end of Napster (as we know it) is probably imminent. But if the RIAA thinks they can shut down music sharing, they need to take a lesson from King Canute: the incoming tide will not obey you when you demand that it stop.

Amazon

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Here’s a weird anti-Amazon screed from MSNBC columnist Chris Byron. His entire complaint seems to be that Jeff Bezos and Amazon have burned through US$ 2.3 billion of investment and VC in four years [they have] and that their annualized growth rate will only increase by 13% this this year. [Byron’s estimate; Bezos is saying 20-30%, which does seem unlikely.]

Hello? What’s with this fruitcake?

In a year when dot-coms are dropping like flies, and even outfits with good business plans, like HomeGrocer, are falling off the ‘net, this guy thinks that Amazon is a failure because it hasn’t kept up its previous triple-digit annual growth rates?

I hate to break this to you, Chris, but growth rates that high are not sustainable even in a boom economy. Which we’re not having right now, in case you haven’t noticed. And welcome to the real world, where companies do lay off employees. What are other option is there? Close their doors? It doesn’t matter how much they grow, if they don’t translate some of that growth into profits.

Certainly I’m no Amazon cheerleader. Some of their business practices are despicable– their software patents and variable pricing, for example– but the company itself is a leader. They have defined the paradigm of online shopping, and Amazon is the yardstick by which all other online retailers are measured.

Blogger

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Pyra, the dotcom that makes Blogger, is down to just one employee, but he says that Blogger will live on. Interestingly, Meg (co-founder and/or second employee, depending on who you listen to) doesn’t mention a word of it.

Peter Merholz offers his take on Pyra’s woes here:

A colleague said it best, and perhaps most brutally, when he said that it seemed that Blogger was run as “a hobby.” Numerous avenues for garnering revenue could have been pursued–none were. For me, that’s always been the most perplexing aspect of this whole endeavor. It’s as if there was simply a mental or organizational block toward accruing money. Which is fine for a hobby. But, and this is bleedingly obvious, not for a business.

Can it be that there are people in this business who don’t realize that it’s always about money?

It’s time to track down that Javascript that does what Blogger does, Ev’s assurances notwithstanding. Thanks, guys, it was fun while it lasted.

[Update: if you can’t get to the Evhead link, keep trying. Something is screwed up there; sometimes it asks for a password, sometimes it doesn’t. Anonymous login doesn’t work. Tell me again how much longer Blogger will live?]

[Another update: It seems to be a problem at Pyra. The Megnut link is now not working. Or maybe they’re mad at me for talking about them> :-)]