Visual Basic ate a considerable chunk of Delphi's lunch in the enterprise area, where price was less of an issue, and large dev shops would buy an MSDN subscription anyway. But it was never more popular than Delphi for desktop apps.
Worldwide, no idea.
The GP seems to be confused about the meaning of "shared library", and seems not to be aware of the existence of static libraries -- which would (as you point out) be perfectly usable in the case of Motif.
'Perfectly usable' is a bit of a reach given how huge Motif was at the time. I shudder to think about the size of a directory with a bunch of X applications that each snarf in all their dependencies; remember we're talking 1990s.
No, GP is “grandparent”, that is, the post two posts upthread from the post in which the term is used (or, in some contexts, the user who posted the post two posts upthread.)
Similarly, GGP is “great grandparent” (3 posts up), and so on.
OP is “original post” or “original poster”, which is (in the general case) a different thing than GP.
Though I could be wrong, as my exposure to internet message boards is weirdly eclectic, but far from comprehensive.
Are you implying that "shared" = dynamically linked? Was there not a version of Motif that could be statically linked?
In the 90's, the most popular UI library for Windows was MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes), which could be linked either statically or dynamically.