Re: Linux and Opportunities for Ada

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <01beeaaa$a56433e0$6eb54f0c@default>,
  "William Thomas" <wthomas.softplex@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Why should the Linux World be any different from the rest of
> the marketing opportunities the Ada vendors have screwed up.
> Lets face it, the vendors will only embrace it after it is too
> late and their is no hope of gaining market share, they will
> appear with too little too late, just as always.

Actually if you were around early on in the 80's the vendors
spent huge amounts of money advertising Ada broadly (e.g. the
series of ads in Byte Magazine by Alsys, which was just one
of the many places this kind of advertisement was run). They
also went to all kinds of general industry shows.

The hard data from this huge expenditure of money was that
it didn't do much. Unless you have a product with a potentially
mass market appeal, shows like Linux World are unlikely to be
cost effective. The point is that languages and compilers are
NEVER mass market appeal items, even in the case of popular
languages -- no one made zillions of dollars selling compilers
(Microsoft certainly does not make their money on compilers).

There is a relatively limited amount of resources available
for Ada promotion and advertisement, and it is important to
spend it most effectively. The general view seems to be that
by FAR the most effective kind of publicity is technical
articles in appropriate trade journals. That still takes time,
money, and effort, but genreally can be far more effective
than paid advertising or attending shows.

There is another big Linux do in New York sometime fairly soon.
That may make sense for us to attend, since obviously the costs
are much lower when the show is close to attend. If we do, we
will report back to CLA on how well it worked (and if there
are Ada/Linux fans in NY, you are certainly welcome to come
and visit us).

Right now, most Ada users and potential Ada users are still
in a wait-and-see mode with Linux, although we certainly see
growing interest in Linux as an Ada target, and as a host for
cross-systems (GNAT is of course available and fully supported
on x86/Linux, and we expect PPC/Linux to be fully supported
in the future).

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies


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