Re: Embeddinator-4000 begetting an Ada-cross-platform future?

[Robert Eachus <rieachus@comcast.net>]

On Monday, February 26, 2018 at 12:06:19 PM UTC-5, Dan'l Miller wrote:
 
> This is tomorrow's carpe diem.  Seize it (or be a victim of natural selection's survival of the fittest).

Seize it yourself.  Pick a company with rights to an existing Ada compiler (I'd choose IBM's former Rational compiler) and a company interested in long-tail marketing (I'd choose Amazon) and convince them of a market for a $99 dollar individual compiler product.  It could support other languages, or interface cleanly with existing low-cost C or C++ compilers.

Succeed, and you may find yourself CEO of a joint venture.  If so, get an early product to market with little advertising, but with a commitment to an on-line update with no further costs for at least five years.  (And no cost to produce commercial products using the compiler.*  If you have to renew your license to maintain those products, the original license should contain a guaranteed renewal price.)

Once you are up and running with a decent marketshare, then you can pursue your grandiouse dreams.  Just do it in a way that keeps your successful business going, but allows new products to supplant it or whatever.  Just don't let those dreams interfere with servicing current customers.

* There is a non-trivial problem here, which you will have to address.  There will be (Ada) packages that interface to other, substantial products.  You want that, but the providers of that technology will need a way to match your efforts to their marketing strategy.  Take, for example, a statistics package.  You may provide the package spec as part of your product, but the package body (in effect) would come from elsewhere, for example SPSS or MATLAB, and require a (per CPU) license to use.  You might want to provide a non-proprietary body to the package, which might not run as fast, or contain fancy analysis tools to use on the program output.  Your choice.  You could even charge $19.95 for a license which allows programmers to produce licensing free products.