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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.
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.
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!
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.