Re: MPA-Ada. Again

[Ken Garlington <garlingtonke@lmtas.lmco.com>]

Richard Riehle wrote:
> 
> In a recent such encounter with a industry official whose company has
> relied heavily on defense appropriations, the subject of leveraging
> existing corporate software resources came up.  Since I am rarely bereft
> of an opinion on such things, I shared my views.
> 
> To my astonishment, the response was something like, "But who can we find
> to fund the development?"  My reply was,  "You take a corporate risk and
> fund it yourselves. Then you sell the product on the open market."  This
> is an odd concept for people who have lived their entire lives in the
> build-it-only-if-funded world.

A couple of comments:

1. There's a lot of examples of companies over-diversifying and killing themselves.
   Why would the average defense contractor want to diversify into the business
   of selling Ada compilers? How is that part of their core competencies?

   (Granted, TI did it, but only to support their existing core competency of
   building DSPs.)

2. The claim is that there is a large potential market for this product. If there's
   a business case that support this, then there should be no problem getting
   venture capital. Why should a defense contractor get into the venture capital
   business?

3. Doesn't appealing to the defense sector to fund new Ada markets undercut the
   claim of Ada's viability outside that sector?

My company paid for the development of new Ada compilers in the early 80's. I like
the COTS model much better.

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