I saw a very interesting article on ZDNet about a real case of an Australian company in the medical field. You can read the article, with extensive #34es from Malcolm Groves, at www.zdnet.com/pascal-still-an-advantage-for-some-ios-android-developers-7000014743/. I also witnessed a few companies trying to switch away from Delphi and realizing this is much more difficult than they had anticipated, because despite great marketing, most other development tools have their own shortcomings. Now, while migrating to Unicode or mobile requires you to have a second look to your code, a lot of it moves over quite seamlessly, including database access, and more.

Speaking of other tools, I think Eclipse received a significant blow yesterday by the announcement of Google transitioning their "primary" Android IDE from it to Intelli-J. This is a very nice Java tool, with a free community edition and a paid version including high-end features. I guess that when some of our users claim all IDEs should be free these days, we have a counterpoint (honestly they do have lower prices, but they are selling "only" an IDE, while we have compilers and libraries on top of it).

In terms of comments, we found a very nice one from Wilfred Olouch on this David I blog post on iOS support in Delphi XE4 vs. XE2 (which is also worth reading), answering to why a developers should pay for an IDE to build iOS apps, when xCode is free from Apple:

I can think of three reasons that apply to me and might to you as well:
(1) I already know the Delphi language and prefer it to Objective C
(2) The drop component / double-click / code behind model is easier than the X-Code inlet/outlet, etc model
(3) when FireMonkey for Android ships, there will be no X-code for Android; your app in Delphi will cross-compile.

Three points I fully agree with, thanks for the coincise summary, Wilfred.