Re: Ada's (in)visibility and pricing!

[seas.gwu.edu!mfeldman@uunet.uu.net (Michael Feldman)]

In article <9209190322.AA21359@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu> SAHARBAUGH@ROO.FIT.EDU writes:

>I don't vend Ada compilers but I do vend Ada related
>services and products.  I have a LOT of sympathy
>for Ada compiler vendors.  Their market economics
>is distorted by one dominant customer (Uncle Sam, no
>relation) and their users are very smart, some smarter
>than they are. (What I mean is knowledgable of the
>technology, not basic IQ).  They are caught where
>the Capitalistic system is trying to serve the
>Government.  They aren't allow but they are
>They aren't allowed to make much money but they 
>are allowed to go broke.  No wonder they look to
>C++ where the market forces are "normal".

By "they" I assume you mean the prime contractors. Where is it written that
a compiler vendor isn't allowed to make "much" money selling the product
commercially?

This may be an off-the-wall analogy, but the military is buying a lot of
standard 1/2-ton pickups these days. Does Chrysler sell these to the
government at an outrageous price? No, everyone knows (approximately)
the price of a pickup, so I would guess that Uncle Sam pays roughly
the same price for a Dodge Dakota that you or I would (or rather that
another fleet owner would). (Am I OK so far?)

Now if Chrysler started trying to sell those Dakotas to you and me for
10x the price of a Chevy equivalent, how many do you think they'd sell?
What the Ada compiler folks don't seem to want to focus on is that the
overall software market is a whole lot bigger than just DoD. If DoD
likes off-the-shelf pickups at regular prices, why not off-the-shelf
compilers at regular prices?

Of course there are special Ada ports for special DoD board configs,
etc., but the mainstream host=target compilers would have a big
potential market if only the vendors would treat a compiler just
like the competition treats a compiler. 

Just so we aren't hand-waving about theoretical numbers here, why not
recall Rich Pattis' list of RISC 6000 prices:

> FYI: I got IBM's RISC 6000 catalog:
>
> AIX XL C++     $ 7,000
> AIX XL FORTRAN $ 6,090
> AIX VS COBOL   $ 8,735
> AIX Ada        $30,570
> AIX XL Pascal  $ 5,235

How ON EARTH can they justify a 4-5x difference for the Ada compiler?
Obviously they do not think the market is going to be large. What they
are doing is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy here. Only those
companies forced by the mandate to do Ada will choose it. The market
will therfore be small and captive, proving their claim that the
market is small. As Charles Colson once said,

"When you've got them by the b*lls, their hearts and minds will follow."

5 or so years ago, the vendors were implying that the prices would drop
once the compilers were mature and a lot of the R&D was written off,
as well as the extraordinarily high first cost of validation. OK, it's
five years later. Why are they still not pricing stuff competitively
(against the other languages, that is)?

I've been told I need a business-school course to understand this.
Perhaps I do. Maybe only in a B-school could they rationalize this kind
of irrationality.

Or can somebody explain it in terms non-B-schools grads can understand?

Cheers -

Mike Feldman