Re: Ada vendors and the art of selling used cars

[Jerry Petrey <"jdpetrey<NOSPAM>"@west.raytheon.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> Its pretty easy to go "Prices good until Whenevuary 32, 2001, Payable in US
> dollars drawn against a US bank, Terms subject to change without notice."
> Typically, the reason for not doing this is because then the product becomes
> a commodity that is bought from the lowest bidder. (Its a dirty little
> secret that marketing folks would rather you didn't know about. :-) There
> are some currency exchange issues, but generally currency doesn't fluctuate
> erratically in big jumps from one day to the next, so price quotes for
> fairly inexpensive items (not, say $100m worth of Japanese steel - but a few
> hundred worth of software) over a fairly short time is not likely to be a
> problem.
> 
> If you can get someone to talk to a sales rep then the rep can start
> pointing out the product distinction that justifies the (possibly) higher
> prices. With Gnat out there downloadable free off charge, anybody who says
> "Here's my Ada compiler for $20..." is at a disadvantage because $20 is more
> than $0. Someone has to be able to explain that for $20 you get efficiency
> improvement by a factor of 10, absolutely no bugs, free 24 hour a day
> telephone support, and a rep coming to your house to install the compiler
> and lean over your shoulder for the first month fixing anything that goes
> wrong. (Now is it worth $20 to you? How about if I throw in a set of Ginsu
> Steak Knives? :-)
> 
> MDC

I agree Marin.  There are no valid reasons not to publish the prices of 
Ada compilers and tools.  As you have said before, we need a vendor to
make a complete development environment available at a reasonable price
to the individual user.  Before Ada can get more accepted in the
industry,
more S/W engineers must start using it and one way to get more using it
is
to make it available to them in a very usable form and as cheap as
possible.
In the long run, you'll increase your sales to the big companies this
way.
It is people like us who have a chance to influence our companies to
make
the right choices of tools and languages.  I am happy to try out a
number of
Ada compilers at home but I sure don't expect to pay $500 to $1000 for
each of
them.

My experience with Aonix has not been a good one.  A few years ago, I
went that
route of contacting their sales rep for a compiler to evaluate (the
early version
of Object Ada).  They made a reasonable price on a consultant's version
with a
support contract.  But after a year had passed and I had not received
any notice
of renewal of the support, I tried contacting the lady who handled
this.  Over a
period of a few weeks, I called dozens of times, left messages when I
could get
through at all and never received a return call.  I finally gave up for
a while 
until I tracked down a way to call her without going through the phone
mail
system.  She quickly dismissed all the trouble I had reaching her and
said since
my support contract had expired I would have to pay for two years to
catch up (even
though there had not been any updates in that last year).

In my previous job at Lockheed using an Aonix Ada compiler we paid an
outrageous
price for support which was still not good. 

This is not the way for a vendor to build a big customer base in a
market that
is (sadly) rather small already.

We need Ada vendors who really care about the long term growth of Ada
and are
willing to make commitments to help that growth.  Ada is a language that
can
make difference in the quality (and safety) of the software being
produced 
today but compiler vendors must start taking a long term view and do
'the 
right thing' to support this growth.

Jerry
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-- Jerry Petrey                                                
-- Senior Principal Systems Engineer - Navigation, Guidance, & Control
-- Raytheon Missile Systems          - Member Team Ada & Team Forth
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