The insanely high prices aren't helping either though. Yes yes, they are not 'high' if you are a fortune 1000, however, they are high compared to what everyone is used to now. They didn't step on the train of making for instance a version free if you are an open source dev. Or doing low monthly payments. Or do anything 'cool', like turn up and give a demo on how to implement reactive manifesto complaint software client/server with a few clicks / lines of code. That kind of thing would be relevant and interesting to devs now; if you can do a dashboard in Mac OS X, Windows, iOS, Android with all the backend & frontend stuff smoothly working together, smoothly tested and smoothly deployed, showing off those 6000 datapoints per second coming into the server and the client and still have a responsive interface companies would listen. But they don't; they just don't 'do' anything people want now besides turning up to the mobile parties way too late.
I kind of wonder how many devs still are working on Delphi and if they are not only just bugfixing...
I think Embarcadero is seriously hurting themselves with their bunker mentality.
Their whole "there are only X paying customers left, therefore we need to charge $3000" stinks of someone who is preparing for failure, instead of growth.
It really looks like low self-esteem play of some group that secretly believes the market doesn't want what they have, so they desperately milk their few remaining customers to make next months payroll.
I keep hoping some startup sees the huge arbitrage opportunity that is sitting there. Someone just needs to come along and build a quality GUI around the toolchain - very much like what Xamarin did for Mono - and similarly they need to charge a sane subscription model (free for OS/hobbyist, $99 personal dev, $399 corporate lite, etc).
I kind of wonder how many devs still are working on Delphi and if they are not only just bugfixing...