[Lazarus] [OT] New "free" IDE from Trolltech

[Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho]

I think it's very interresting how things turned out. Trolltech
started as a very small company, like 2 guys in a garage, and they
started developing their UNIX GUI library, a very small niche market.
At this time, Borland was huge, with their Windows GUI library + IDE +
Toolchain, and hat a large market, was one of the most important
player in the software development area.

A lot of people said in the borland newsgroups: support Mac OS X,
support Linux, go Unicode, go 64-bits, etc. But they never listened,
instead they went .NET, feeding the competition and stoping in time.
After a huge delay they finally went unicode.

Trolltech on the other hand went cross-platform, and walked their way
up with a very good quality product.

So now, the way I see it, things are inverted. Delphi is a small niche
player with little future ahead of it, while Trolltech seams much more
important, and is even active in the smartphone and PDA areas, with
their own frame buffer library and also support for Windows CE coming
soon. I don't have their profits and market value, but I wouldn't be
surprised if Trolltech is much ahead of CodeGear nowadaws.

It seams that the crowd saying that cross-platform is important was correct.

Luckly there is Free Pascal and Lazarus, so people with Object Pascal
code bases don't need to sink with the Delphi boat.

-- 
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho