Re: Ichbiah's letter to Anderson: Here it is

[bu.edu!inmet!spock!stt@purdue.edu (Tucker Taft)]

In article <SRCTRAN.93Apr12145214@world.std.com> srctran@world.std.com (Gregory
 Aharonian) writes:
>>>    By contacting Dr. Ichbiah, I have received permission to post his letter
>>>to Christine Anderson to comp.lang.ada.  Here it is.  While I can't comment
>>>on the technical aspects of his letter, from a marketing point of view, Ada9
X
>>>sounds like a disaster.  
> ^^^^^^
>
>>I encourage you to study the Ada 9X documents and the Ada 9X
>>"marketing" literature (both of which are freely available from
>>the Ada 9X project office, and most of which are posted on
>>ajpo.sei.cmu.edu as well as the Ada 9X bulletin board), 
>>and to go to one of our many public presentations, and draw your own 
>>conclusions.
>
>. . . I as the potential "customer"
>should not have to go out and find out about your "product", Ada9X.  You
>as the vendor must seek me out by advertising and direct mailing to me
>these literature on file at AJPO.  

My point was simply that if you go out of your way 
to seek out and publicize Jean Ichbiah's letter, then
you personally might want to take the time 
to read and study the 9X proposals and literature 
and presentations, before speculating on what 
9X marketing "sounds" like.  I certainly agree that we can't
expect the general public to make such an effort, but you seem
to have almost endless energy in poking fun at the Ada community, 
and you might want to devote some of that energy to learning what 
is really out there on Ada 9X, if only to help inform the "masses"
rather than to publicize only half of the story.

> . . . Your public presenations are all
>inside the Mandated world, which as a potential customer of Ada9X does me
>no good.

Ada 9X has been presented to several organizations
that are non-DoD, non-government, and non-mandated.  Once there
are implementations, the focus will shift heavily to promoting
Ada to new markets.

>	It continually amazes me on the lack of interest by the Mandated
>world to spend any of its own money promoting Ada outside the Mandated
>world.  The assumption, I guess, is that everyone outside the Mandated
>world is going to beat the door down to get to Ada9X.

You will find that as Ada 9X transitions from vaporware to software, 
the level of marketing by the Ada 9X project to the 
non-mandated, non-government world will increase
dramatically.  Most people out there shopping at Object World,
OOPSLA, etc., are looking for a solution that they can test-drive
now, and implement in the next year or so.  Until we have some
reasonably robust implementations of Ada 9X that potential
users can get quickly, we are just blowing smoke and potentially 
wasting our marketing dollars.

Currently we are hitting the various conferences with technical
presentations.  Once we have "product" (probably late 1993 for the
GNU Ada9X "GNAT") you can be sure that we will be hitting the 
non-mandated world with more of a "marketing" orientation.

>Greg Aharonian
>Source Translation & Optimiztion
>P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178

S. Tucker Taft  stt@inmet.com
Intermetrics, Inc.
Cambridge, MA  02138