So it seems that Borland have made two massive mistakes.

1, They have failed to innovate, made some bad calls and lost ground to the beast.

2, They have priced themselves out of the market by making their products inaccessible to those who would otherwise be loyal to them.

Wakeup call to Borland I think... Small companies can afford Visual Studio and not Delphi. Maybe in their efforts to focus on the enteprise level players, they've forgotton the little guys.

FreePascal and Lazarus deserves to do well and perhaps become the product Delphi used to be. I hope that smaller companies take it seriously and see it as a route to reall cross platform development without having to rely on a Javaesque .net runtime.

If code was written properly in the first place, there would be no need for a common runtime. It would cross compile. But that would mean, no Microsoftisms and no Borlandisms but following the standards... I think that FreePascal is going in the right direction.