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Inprise Director Resigns in Merger Protest
JohnZed writes, " A press release just came out announcing that a member of Inprise's board of directors, Robert Coates, has resigned in protest over the terms of the pending Corel-Inprise merger. Apparently, all is not going well with Corel's attempts to capture a place in the Linux market. "
Yikes. After reading a few pages of this, my head is reeling.
Years of complaints about misbehavior by executives in mergers, and then one does the *right* thing, and we all complaint.
The board of directors are supposed to represent the shareholders. It is generally a Good Thing (tm) for them to have a large enough stake in the company to align their interests with theose of the shareholders. He has over 3 million shares.
When an offer to buy the company comes, directors are supposed to evaluate whether or not the offer is in the best interests of the shareholders, and find a better deal if they can (or, remain solo if they think the shareholders will do better). THat is *exactly* what he is doing here: saying that the shareholders may be better with a different deal,k and that they should go shopping.
Finally, there has been motion towards outside directors in recent years--rather than form the whole board from company management, who have their own agenda (keeping their perks & incomes), the outside directors can freely object, and speak *just* from shareholder interests--*particularly* in the case of mergers.
We've spent the last fifteen or so years trying to create *exactly* this situation, and people are jumping all over him for this. There's even a couple below that think that he's upset because he was scheming to be CEO. Oh my goodness, a CEO (yes, he is CEO of another firm) with expertese in management consulting brought in as an outside director [*gasp*] submitted management suggestions! Why would he do this without ulterior motives???
Maybe he's right about the deal; maybe he's not. But his role in the system is to make exactly this decision; that's why the Imprise shareholders pay him in the first place.
Anybody got a buzzword to English dictionary I could borrow?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Mergers always involve casualties, even at board level. And even among the survivors there will be those for whom things didn't go the way they wanted. I don't expect the market will read *too much* into this little spat as long as Robert Coates shuts up and goes away soon.
But the charges he is making are certainly interesting. And he appears to be some sort of management consultant, which doesn't fit well with the usual picture of a disgruntled and displaced director forced out and with nowhere else to go.
If Coates makes a rational case in his upcoming letter, the SEC may be compelled to investigate and that would not be too good for Corel (especially given the recent bad publicity surrounding Mike Cowpland's alleged insider dealing). However unjust it may be, mud sticks.
However it plays out, if the merger doesn't go through it'll mean yet another disastrous blow to Corel's share price. In that case Corel may find *themselves* ripe for takeover.
Personally I'd hate to see this happen to Corel but OTOH I can't exactly say I was overjoyed when I the merger was announced. Inprise are already pretty much in bed with the Open Source community and I can't really see how a merger would benefit us. I'd much rather see a diverse market of smaller companies co-operating with each other than a market dominated by a small handful of megacorporations. Megacorporations tend to stuff the customer every opportunity they get; ethics and morals get blown out the window in the name of responsibility to shareholders.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
As several people have already asked about Delphi for Linux, I'd like to give a pointer to Lazarus. It's a project that is aiming to create a free Delphi for Linux. Medigo was another project but it apparently died while Lazarus is moving faster than ever.
Lazarus uses the Free Pascal Compiler which is already a great pascal compiler. It's semanticly compatible with Turbo Pascal 7.0 but it also contains a lot of Delphi extenstions like long strings. The Lazarus team is writing all the class libraries and an editor.
At the moment lots of classes are done but they could use some help with remaining classes and the editor. Check out their home page and have a look.
If you're really interested in the details of this merger, check out http://www.pathcom.com/~dmagie/" for an in-depth description of why this is such a bad deal.
If I had to summarize my own views, I'd say the key thing is that it totally undervalues Inprise. Did you know that Inprise has $250 million in actual cash on hands and 0 outstanding debt? But this merger, right now, values it at under $500 million TOTAL. Sure, a year ago the company was bleeding money and nobody wanted to touch it. But now it's breaking even and has a solid long-term plan to be the best, serious provider of cross-platform development tools. As a developer who has to use Windows and Linux (and would LOVE a good Linux RAD tool), I think that's a pretty decent plan.
Top that off with the fact that Corel and Inprise are targetting totally different, non-overlapping audiences (beginning users vs. professional developers), and it really makes me wonder who the hell thought of this deal anyways. --JRZ
It's my take here that Mr. Coates' motives in this could be very personal. The article states that he owns 3,005,440 shares of Inprise and if Corel's previous acquisition record is to be applied here then those shares could be worth very little in a year or two.
Corel has a strong history of losing to Microsoft in any area in which it decides to go head to head. Probably Mr. Coates believes that his, and his company's interests are best served not in a turf war with Microsoft, but by servicing both camps with much needed multi platform development tools (Borland) and application architechtures (Visigenic).
Hotnutz.com - Funny
MS "invested" is Borland as a settlement to a lawsuit. It wasn't a willing transaction, and they only have non-voting stock.
Huh?! Unless you're seriously advocating that a 300K program-in-development that doesn't do anything approaching what the user wants is somehow better than a 1.5 MB program that does, you missed my point entirely. My point is more about development leadtimes than about code size.
I'm estimating that the same program, coded with vi and make and done the old-fashioned way, would come out somewhere around a megabyte of finished executable. Okkay, the Delphi program is 50% bigger. Big, fat, hairy deal. The version coded the old-fashioned way would take about 10 times as long to develop and debug. In the world of business, where people expect their computers to actually do useful work, that tradeoff is a no-brainer.
Without a RAD tool, Linux will never make it out of the server room and onto people's desktops, for it's completely unsuitable as an applications platform. People following the One True Linux Way as you advocate it will get run over by others who beat them to market with bigger, slower, but running code.
I care as much about Linux as you claim to. However, to me, Linux has the potential to replace Windows in many more roles than just Web and file servers. To compete in those spaces, it must have comparable capabilities, and Delphi brings a very important set of those capabilities to the Linux world. Market acceptance is much, much more important then ideological purity if the goal is to have Linux be accepted as widely as Windows.
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Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
I think the word RAD is a buzzword. Sure, you can place out a button a few seconds faster in VB than QT, but how much time of the overall project-time does that account for? 2% ?
The real beauty of a RAD environment such as Delphi is that it removes the need to explicitly code the standard boilerplate that has to be done every time you add a user interface control to an application, and the message handlers, and control blocks, and on and on and on...Anyone who's written a Windows (or OS/2 PM, or X, or other stuff) app the old-fashioned way will be amazed at how much time you spend working on the problem to be solved, rather than in the tedious low-level stuff, in a RAD environment.
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Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Have you ever tried QT yourself?
No, I haven't. I guess the central question is: How much time do you spend writing code that does the real work of your application, and how much time do you spend writing code that handles the mechanics of the user interface? My experience with Delphi on the payroll project is that nearly 95% of my time is spent on writing the application, not the mechanics. Can Qt achieve that?
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Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Who would want to code using the Delphi or C++ Builder environments? Even for a Windows application their interface sucks, and the underlying code base isn't much better. It supports a vast, bloated and confused class structure which encourages the creation of slow, windy programs. Why do we need software like this when we have tools like vi and make already part of Linux?
Have you ever developed a serious application with Delphi? I have and am, a large, very customized payroll system for a company with extremely nonstandard payroll requirements. (Their chart of accounts is over 70,000 long, and 95% of that is payroll for 450 employees.) It would have taken me 10 times as long to develop this program in a non-RAD environment. Yes, the program is larger than it would be if I'd used more traditional development tools...but I'd still be developing early functionality, instead of getting ready to hand them a feature-complete version. What's better, a program that they can use that has a 1.5 MB load module, or a 300K load module that they can't use to get real work done?
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Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
This is typical of why Linux is so backwards in the global market. Your attitude may be appropriate for writing applications on a 1Mb 386, but these days computers have power.
"In the Linux world it is not acceptable to have this extra 1.3 MB of redundant code just to save yourself some effort. "
Not acceptable to you perhaps. I accept this because I realize that a 1.3Mb file size doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference, but the fact that I have this great functional application *now* rather than 2 years down the track, does make a difference.
"True Linux coders understand the need for small, tightly coded applicaions and will therefore eschew Delphi as being an evil Windows tool not suitable for Linux coding."
I think you mean "True 1970s coders".
"If people start to program their applicaions under Delphi it will be the start of a slippery slope, the end of which will see Linux becoming a Windows clone."
You would deny Linux the huge range of applications that Windows has (and in fact, as we all know, one of the major reasons Linux does not have as wide usage as Windows is because it doesn't have the application base) merely because you don't like code bloat?
You could label any OS with a GUI and lots of code a "Windows clone". You seem to do this, and decide you would rather be crippled than risk that someone might apply this name. Oh dear..
He is acting in the interests of the shareholders of Inprise to the best of his ability and knowledge. Clearly he wants to work with Corel. And the fact that he is resigning now rather than immediately after the mreger plans were announced says to me that this is over the details of the merger deal itself rather than the whole idea of merging. Let's see how Inprise and Corel react to the news.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
At that time, Microsoft invested more than $100 millions in Inprise, and that really scared the hell out of me. Like many Java-CORBA developers, I was not too happy to hear that Microsoft - the DCOM protagonist - had just gained access to one of the top CORBA product: VisiBroker.
Now I'm a bit more at ease because we've got two opposite and strong politics:
Now, I really can not understand why Microsoft invested in Inprise. It is the most aggressive competitor they had for long. And I wish them all the best...
Have you ever looked through the entire class hierarchy of the VCL Deplhi uses? If you start at the base class TObject and work down through TPersistant, TComponent, TStream and all of the rest you'd realise that there is a huge amount of work just porting the library across so that it works with Linux rather than the Win32 API.
And that's not even counting the effort required to port the IDE, standard libraries, compiler, debugger, profiler etc. etc. A full RAD tool is a very large program.