From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: 30 Apr 93 18:13:11 GMT From: inmet!spock!stt@uunet.uu.net (Tucker Taft) Subject: Re: Ichbiah's letter to Anderson: Here it is Message-ID: <1993Apr30.181311.20649@inmet.camb.inmet.com> List-Id: In article 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