I'm having a very long think about this one. The continual existence of Delphi in the commercial space is a positive thing for the language (which is what I *really* care about). It's in the languages best interests and therefore mine that Embarcaderos experience with Delphi in the marketplace stays well above the level of economic viability, preferably in the maniacal laughter profit range.
I will express my opinion in a more comprehensive manner when I've got my angle nailed down but what I'm thinking in a hypothetical conversation with 'the man' is basically this :
Rip out all the visual form stuff, components, the whole works. Forget a visual RAD tool, just an IDE is all we need (like codeblocks)
Have a template system along with updated headers etc for popular cross platform APIs, SDL, Native+OpenGL, SDL+OpenGL etc (like codeblocks)
The IDE must work native on Linux, Windows, Mac. The *free* competition doesn't have any issues with this or platforms that we'd not even expect. That is totally unacceptable, compiling on Windows for OSX, IOS etc is just a big messy cop out and you should be very ashamed. Same again for lack of Linux support. That's damn near commercial suicide. I mean, Delphi is pushed as the perfect tool for database style applications and it really is! so why on earth would you cut off a large portion of the market? especially in places like Call centers etc the people that roll out installations to large number of machines, more and more are switching to Linux to lower costs, governments across the world are doing the same, even to the extent of banning windows etc in some places. This is a large part of your primary market right? rapidly evolving database clients? ignore Linux support at your peril!
So basically, we need the code window (preferably with code completion etc) compiler, debugger, and community contributed or regularly maintained headers / interfaces for common APIs.
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Just don't let anybody in marketing get involved, they'll ruin it. They'll just try and cripple the product into an advertising platform for the more expensive versions. No doubt why cross platform support was removed from the previous basic versions of Delphi. This decision alone has made me personally highly resistant to even testing your new products. That cross platform support can be removed and stated as a 'feature' for more expensive versions? if you think that's acceptable then may I also suggest you charge extra for distribution DVDs that don't melt in the drive? perhaps you'd like to charge a subscription for the 'begin' and 'end' keywords? You get my point.
Edit : That's a little harsh, just don't remove cross platform from any version, it's not an additional feature, it's a basic fundamental expectation of any compiler + standard library/runtime etc. You *certainly* can't remove it when the free alternative not only has it but does it far better.
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On an unrelated note, replace your compiler with FPC or open source yours. you're playing a game of catchup that you'll never win and if you'd switched before now you'd already have Delphi on all the platforms and saved yourself a ton of money. For a product where the compiler takes a back-seat to the component features, I don't understand why you're so adamant about wasting money on your in-house compiler when you could of contributed to FPC instead (like Apple and all those really rich companies do with things like Linux + LLVM) and have your main selling points reaching the maximum potential market. I mean if the Delphi compiler so much better, how come it doesn't work on Linux? or PowerPC? or in fact all the sqillions of things that FPC works with? Yes I can appreciate that the design might be superior, cleaner etc but Betamax lost to VHS didn't it? just how much money will you have to spend on your compiler to reach FPC as it is now? and when you finally reach it, just how far ahead will FPC still be?
It's Lazarus you're loosing customers to, not FPC.
Adding users to the language in general creates more customers for you. Contribute to FPC, make it utterly awesome. Be Apple to LLVM and thou shall dominate. If you love some aspect of your compiler so much that it's preventing you from making this leap, then fork FPC or contribute it to FPC. You could have a large force of talented developers working on your compiler *for free* (plus your in-house devs), more pascal users in general due to excellent tools, more market reached by Delphi due to the vast platform support plus your marketing guys can harp on about the whole Open Source aspect in the blurb. It works for Apple, Google etc
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