"David Erbas-White" <✉arachneering.com> wrote in message

> I'm more looking at the situation that missing a quarterly target to
> enhance an annual target may be the 'prudent' move.  I'm not suggesting
> making anything riskier, just to change the perspective slightly.

Plus, that makes the assumption that giving info out harms sales in the 
first place.  They havent sold that to me yet.  One could equally speculate 
that by being overly secretive, they're driving sales away because 
developers will want a sense of security about the future of the dev tool 
they choose to invest in.  The thing to keep looking at is that Delphi went 
from a main stream development tool to a very niche product over about 5 
years - while taking the current 'secretive' approach.


Another thing to keep in mind... there's no mac or (active) linux delphi 
compiler.  So they wouldnt be harming sales of their mac and linux compiler 
if they released more info about them.  If anything, they'd be keeping 
people from jumping ship.


Also... Could it be that releases are just too frequent?  A yearly release 
is a pretty fast pace.  I can understand Embarc wanting to get a new release 
or two out the door to show they're on the ball with their new aquisition... 
but if upgrades are really hurt by announcements of the next version... 
maybe thats because new versions are so frequent that people can wait? 
Perhaps its time to slow things down, and have less frequent releases that 
have more pronounced changes, making the incentive to upgrade more evident? 
Its one thing to put off an upgrade for a few months, but another to put it 
off a few years.


One more commment - the concern seems to be for losing 'upgrades'.  All well 
and good, but if they are so reliant on upgrades (or what I like to call, 
milking their customers), perhaps its an indicator they arent forcusing 
enough on reaching new customers.