I was thinking the other day how people really don't want to pay to buy a programming language - this was the doom of Delphi because it was super popular and alot of people liked it but people really hate paying for programming languages.
On the other hand, people seem OK with paying for IDEs - witness Jetbrains with maybe $1BUSD revenue versus Embarcadero at $100MUSD (extrapolated from 2021 numbers). The numbers are a guess but the point remains.
So perhaps Delphi might have had a different future if it explicitly made all its language free and sold its IDE. People might have been pretty happy with that, because as I recall the Delphi IDE was really nice.
Interesting take. Although, back then people did pay for some other languages right (via paying for the de facto IDE license, ala Visual Studio/.NET).
I think Delphi 7 was very successful, and then 8 and 2005 were just horrible products. It didn't help that around this time native OS apps were replaced with web apps. Paying to write Delphi for the web is insane since it's just transpilation at that point.
It died well before the era where most people began to use free free tools and compilers. Microsoft killed it by hiring Hejlsberg and then doing a decent job with C# and WinForms.
On the other hand, people seem OK with paying for IDEs - witness Jetbrains with maybe $1BUSD revenue versus Embarcadero at $100MUSD (extrapolated from 2021 numbers). The numbers are a guess but the point remains.
So perhaps Delphi might have had a different future if it explicitly made all its language free and sold its IDE. People might have been pretty happy with that, because as I recall the Delphi IDE was really nice.
Anyhow that's all history.