Re: Open comment to Ted Holden

[news.u.washington.edu!milton.u.washington.edu!mfeldman@beaver.cs.washingt on.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <1745@nic.cerf.net> jonesm@nic.cerf.net (Matthew Jones) writes:
>And for my 2 cents.

  [ 1.5 cents deleted ]
>
>To me that largest problem with Ada is that it doesn't have a large
>customer base. So the Ada Compiler/development systems are not checked
>out as well as its commerial counterparts. How many beta test sites
>are there for the average C compiler? How many for Ada? And keep in mind
>that Ada is a lot more complicated than C. Borland has sold hundreds
>of thousands of their C (and C++) compilers, how many has Meredian
>or Alsys sold for the PC?
>
Now my $0.02. Meridian and Alsys (and RR Software) have sold - at least -
several thousand copies apiece of their systems. It's not up to Borland's
quantities, or Microsoft's, but it's not trivial either.

Meridian, Alsys, and RR are, in my opinion, guilty of a terribly myopic
view of Ada, shared by much of the Ada industry. Ada does not have a large
customer base because - several years ago when there was plenty of DoD
and venture money flowing, the Ada companies failed to hire marketing
forces who would break their backs enlarging that customer base. Now,
when money is tight, they complain - perhaps with justification -
that they can't afford to do so. 

IMHO, none of the Ada companies seem to have done a close study of
the successful mass-market software houses, and tried to emulate them.
Ada is a VERY GOOD language, and could be quite a worthy competitor to
the others, but its proponents must be willing to admit that Ada has
mass-market potential. Meridian persists in selling against Alsys, which
persists in selling against TeleSoft, etc. No company has had the
vision to sell - HARD - against the other languages.

The engineers in these companies believe they have a better mousetrap
(at least I think they do), but the world can't beat a path to their
door because they don't know the door is there.

One small example: I meet a lot of college kids who grew up in the Seattle
area. The biggest employer in Seattle is Boeing (~100,000 jobs here). My
guess is that Boeing has as many software people as Microsoft (which has,
I think, about 6000 employees). Yet these students ALL know that Microsoft
is heavy into C, and very few - if any - know that Boeing is heavy into
Ada. Their jaws drop when I tell them.

Why are Borland and Microsoft compilers sold in every software store in
town, but nobody's heard of Meridian? The Ada companies will either learn
that they have to spend money to make money, hire some decent marketeers,
take some risks, and go for it, or they will simply shrivel up and die.
Ada is a much better invention than its own proponents allow it to be.

Spare me the flames about how expensive validation is. I know that, and
know that all the validation in the world will not sell a product its
own manufacturers refuse to market aggressively.

Mike Feldman