“At a meeting with software development gurus in Microsoft’s
programming tools group, I asked if they were supposed to be a
profit center-or if they were just supposed to cover their overhead
while making it easy for ISVs to build distinctive Windows-only
products. “Good question,” they said.”
“End of conversation. That chat occurred many years before
Microsoft “extended” Java for enhanced Windows capability; it even
took place before Visual C++ became a COM authoring tool kit,
moving away from its early role as a very good environment for a
cross-platform, midlevel language. But that long-ago meeting comes
back to mind with this month’s news of collapsed merger talks
between Corel and Inprise.”
“A Corel/Inprise pairing might have given desktop and
personal Linux systems the same synergy that worked so well for
Windows. We might have seen Corel’s consumer-friendly platform
(at least compared with many other Linux distributions) with the
company’s capable suite of mass-market applications, augmented by
the robust Borland tools for writers of more exotic software: tools
that could have been sold on a break-even basis, or even as loss
leaders, instead of needing to pay their own way.”