Irie Tools (Business & Technology)

Hello again. I am back to share with you some of my plans for the future of Irie Tools.

The future of Irie Tools is all about focus, focus, and focus. Instead of producing a general purpose Pascal programming environment (i.e. Irie Pascal), Irie Tools will focus on web development (both web sites and web development tools). The web development tools are expected to include:

• An open source XHTML engine that will make it easy to generate XHTML pages using any programming language (I think there are ‘better’ ways to do this than ASP.NET and JSP).
• The next major release of Irie Pascal (i.e. version 3.0) which will be enhanced and integrated with the XHTML engine to make it easy to create web sites.

The plan is that the web development tools will support web development on Windows only (at least initially). However the hosting platform (i.e. the platform you would use to host the web sites) will be the Apache web server, running on Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux (Red Hat, other distributions will be added later).

Why did I make the decision to focus? Well, I have been reading alot of business books recently (about product strategy and branding), and they all seem to agree that it is a good thing for a business (especially a small business) to find an area of specialization and focus there.

Why focus on web development? Web development has the advantages of being an important (and growing more important every day) area of software development, but still relatively new (with room for new players and new ways of doing things).

P.S. Of course when the next major release of Irie Pascal becomes available special upgrade prices will be offered to existing customers.