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

[inmet!spock!stt@uunet.uu.net (Tucker Taft)]

In article <SRCTRAN.93Apr26204948@world.std.com> 
  srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) writes:

> . . .
>     But I see nothing where it involves spending your own money.  Please
>explain why not once in four years, Intermetrics did not place a single
>ad mentioning its Ada capabilities in Embedded Systems Programming.

As Mike Ryer pointed out, Intermetrics was never in the off-the-shelf,
Ada 83 cross-compiler market.  Our biggest Ada 83 market has
been IBM/370 MVS.  Rest assured that we spent plenty of our
own money productizing, maintaining, and marketing our MVS Ada compiler.
(We developed the basic Ada compiler technology under a competitive
contract with the Air Force.  That covered significantly less than
half of the ultimate cost to bring it to market.)
But as you might guess, we didn't feel that Embedded Systems Programming
was quite the perfect fit for our expected MVS Ada customer.

Every company makes its own decisions about what products
to develop and how to sell them.  You are certainly mistaken
if you think the Ada compiler vendors can just sit around on their
duffs and pull in the money from "captive" compiler sales.  First
of all, looking strictly at the "captive" DoD market, there is not
a single significant host/target combination that does not have
multiple vendors competing.  Secondly, even on the "cushy" government
contracts, it is easy to lose money because of the long drawn-out
competion phase that precedes contract award, followed by the
frequently shifting requirements thereafter.

I totally agree with you that Ada 83 as a language was not
marketed well to the "world."  However, unlike you, I don't
lay the blaim on individual stupidity or laziness, but rather on 
a more community-wide "group think" in the early Ada days that we
had an obviously "better mousetrap" and the world would beat a path
to our doorsteps.  By the time some Ada companies began to break
through to a more realistic assessment of Ada and the required
marketing, they had dug themselves so deep into debt that they couldn't
afford to start over with a more market-oriented strategy.
(It is interesting to look at 10-year old copies of CACM.  SofTech
used to advertise about Ada every month.  It didn't get them very far...
So much for advertising without a market-ready product to back it up.)

Ultimately, many Ada companies just hunkered down with their current
market niche and hoped for the best.  It seems that now, partly
as a result of consolidation in the industry, some Ada companies
are getting themselves onto a sound enough financial footing to
think about (re)launching a more broad-based marketing strategy,
perhaps using Ada 9X as the excuse to get potential customers
to take a "new" look at Ada.  But this takes time and money,
both of which are still in short supply at most Ada companies, partly
due to past misreading of the market.  

At this point, rather than harping on the many mistakes of the
Ada community in the past, we should begin focusing on how
to improve things in the future.  I believe that Chris Anderson
of the 9X project office is doing just that.  AdaNet and the AdaIC
also both seem to be taking a more proactive role in trying to
spread the word.  Other government-sponsored Ada-related organizations,
such as ASSET, seem still to be in a "hunkered-down" or "come-find-us"
mode, which is admittedly a shame.  Of course if they don't read
comp.lang.ada, perhaps we need to find a more constructive way
to wake them up than via periodic flames.  

>Greg Aharonian

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