Re: Ada Compiler Pricing (was Re: Hijacking a Thread was RE: New Ada compiler for .NET)

[Jeffrey Carter <jrcarter@acm.org>]

Robert C. Leif wrote:
> You have just explained a major problem US economy, executives who are
> uneducated in technology.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org [mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org]
> On Behalf Of Richard Riehle
> I see this kind of dumb management a lot in DoD contractor companies.
> Somehow, these corporate level people are so enamoured of the slick
> and glossy ads they fail to recognize quality when they see it.  Xerox
> has been particularly guilty of this kind of glitz thinking when it comes
> to computing.   They could own the marketplace now, if there had
> been a well-functioning brain in the excecutive levels of the company
> during the Seventies and Eighties.

I'm not convinced this is "dumb management" as far as DOD contractors 
are concerned. Look at the contracts in question; you'll usually find 
that the contractor maximizes its profits by maximizing the cost of the 
project. Five software engineers at $100k/yr for one year is a lot less 
attractive than 100 coders at $30k/yr for six years. That the quality of 
the software created by the former is orders of magnitudes better than 
that of the latter isn't a factor. Indeed, if the contract is written 
right, a project that is finally terminated without creating any usable 
software may be the most profitable road for the contractor, and it 
never seems to affect their ability to win more contracts.

-- 
Jeff Carter
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