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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 th

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.

dmitriid 5y ago
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
- nwatson 5y ago
  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.
  - zxspectrum1982 5y ago
    MicroFocus is also in that kind of business
jan_Inkepa 5y ago
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.
badsectoracula 5y ago
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).

dmitriid 5y ago

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

nwatson 5y ago
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.
- zxspectrum1982 5y ago
  MicroFocus is also in that kind of business

jan_Inkepa 5y ago

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.

badsectoracula 5y ago

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).