> All I'm doing is pointing out what I consider to be the mistake of > thinking > that iPhone platform support is going in some way to contribute to the > success of a product with a Windows Enterprise Development price tag. >
I am being more of an oracle than you are, so this is speculative, but I reckon you are still focusing way too narrowly. The issue to me is not whether Delphi Win 32 bit or Win 64 bit has a future against VS. Its more where the developers will be going in 5 years. Will they still be on Windows at all? I am expecting office workers will still have desktops for years to come. But more and more will be moving to phone and netbook devices, and already have started. To me the question is what desktops and mobile devices will be running in 5 years, 10 years, 15 years. Could be one of these scenarios: 1 - Windows 7 and descendants for desktops, Android, OSX, Google OS for mobiles. Increasing power of CPU's still makes desktops viable. Doesn't look like Windows Mobile will be there on mobiles.. Or maybe mobiles become powerful enough to run Windows 7 and descendants. (Battery life and disk size is the main issue to load and run such a big OS on a mobile device compared to the other OS's). 2 - Windows desktops start to be replaced by terminal services and RDP devices to grunty servers. These servers run the legacy Windows apps. Note the word legacy. Windows software starts to move into maintenance mode, as Cobol software is today. Desktops, netbooks and mobiles could be any mixture of OSX, linux, Google OS, Windows, Windows mobile, Android. All can do browsing, VNC, RDP connections to the servers. (I have been watching a colleague do all of these things already from an Android phone. Phone was free on a 2 year Vodaphone plan.) Desktops become a mixture of OS's. The newer development is for these OS, cross platform tools have the advantage. All the commercial software we thought had found its ideal and final home on Windows has to be rewritten or ported yet again for the newer desktops, or run mainly from servers. 3 - Desktops may become largely mainly non-Windows in 5-10-15-20 years. Hardware keeps getting cheaper, instead of $500-$1500 for computers, it soon becomes $50-$500 for desktop RDP devices, netbooks and super-phones. OS are either free (Open source as linux/Android/GoogleOS) or have to be very cheap to compete (iPhone, Windows mobile) i.e. around $10-$100 only. Reason I think this is that linux is maybe making an end run around Windows - the top super computers these days are huge linux clusters (like Google server farms), and the smartest small devices are also linux or Unix based (Android, iPhone, TIVO). Windows prospered all the years it was the best bang for the bucks on the smallest cheapest computers. Now its starting to look like they can't match other OS's on the small cheap devices. Windows still has the greatest API and programming environment and will have for years yet. But the other OS kernels are more reliable, leaner and smaller. The general aim of the GoogleOS is to boot from cold power off to browsing the Internet in 7 seconds, I have seen examples of a linux device able to boot in 1-2 seconds. An example of this is to compare Apple versus MS fortunes - when comparing OSX to Windows on desktops there are advantages either way, they are quite comparable. However when it comes to putting OSX onto an iPhone Apple wins hands down because the Unix or linux kernel can be trimmed down to next to nothing so easily. Another way to read the question is which is easier? Windows to become the best OS on mobile and netbooks, or other OS's to develop the best working environments for typical business (email, word processing, browsing, running general software)? I don't know the answer to that, but as long as phones and netbooks keep outselling desktops the market dollars will decide it. More certainly, iPhone and Android devices will have a growing market, and I would love to be able to program for these without having to learn a new IDE and language.... John _______________________________________________ NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi mailing list Post: delphi@delphi.org.nz Admin: http://delphi.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi Unsubscribe: send an email to delphi-requ...@delphi.org.nz with Subject: unsubscribe
