Re: fantastic Ada promotional piece from Rational(long)

[ISAAC PENTINMAKI <SUNDOG@ACM.ORG>]

>to:    CONDIC@PSAVAX.PWFL.COM
>To:    IN%"INFO-ADA@VM1.NoDak.EDU"  "Recipients of INFO-ADA digests"
>Subject: Re: Fantastic Ada promotional piece from Rational (long)

C>Of course, this was tried by R&R Software years ago and it didn't ...
C>put into selling it to the general populace. (I saw adds in
C>specialized journals, but never saw anything in Byte, nor was it
C>on the shelf at the local software store.)

General ?
Like most compiler companies the effort was directed at programers
(unlike other Ada companies we advertised to the commercial
market from the start, it tooks us about 4 months to find out that
Telesoft even had a competing product back in Aug 1981)
The ads were placed in the original DDJ which competed mostly with 'C'
and Borland Pascal ads (this is before Microsoft existed), we also tried
the more general publications of Infoworld and Byte (look for 1/4 page ads).
Later ads appeared in  Microsystems Journal, Pc World and I think a
couple other magazines that  Ziff-Davis bought and then murdered.

At that time (<1983) the 1/4 page ad cost about $ 500/ad with 3 time
insertion, which is about all that we could budget at that time.
The same ad today costs several thousand dollars and tends be totally
lost in the magazine.

Also it has been my experiance that software stores like most
commercial enterprises do not stock software unless they have
experianced multiple requests for the software (some mail order
chains are the same way) due to the overhead of shipping, keeping stock
and low margins on software costing less than $ 500.00.  For example
the last quote I had for a dealer cost on Windows 3.0 was $ 85.00 but
I could buy it retail for less than $99.00. After shipping costs
you might gross $ 9 on a sale which is not worth while unless you
are talking large quantities or bundling.

MF>Many Ada vendors have told me they were pricing for margin, not volume.
MF>These companies (the ones with the Ada/PC compilers) convinced themselves
MF>that Ada would always be a low-volume thing, and thereby guaranteed
MF>that Ada would be a low-volume thing. I don't think anyone seriously
MF>tested the elasticity; look how hard it is even to find out that

Yeah right, 5 years of marketing our prevalidated Ada compiler at various
prices from $ 99 to $ 1000 from 1981..1986 proved nothing.  But then
we never had the marketing/investor money of Telsoft,Alsys or Rational to
take more than 1 year at a time playing with the prices.  Since About
1989 the prices have been more stable in the $500-1000 range for
most of the products and introductory packages at around $ 100.

Isaac

These views are my own and do not represent the views of my ex-employer.