ACT has to make their own decisions as to what directions they want to go in
and I can't fault them for making a decision to "stick to their knitting".
This is usually the wise choice for a business - unless it isn't. :-) They
appear to be saying "Our market is the high-end industrial user who wants
full support, rapid response to bug fixes, frequent updates, add-on tools,
etc and is ready, willing and able to pay for such high-end service." Fine.
Great. More power to them. They've built up experience with that market and
they step out of that box only at very high risk. Trying to jump into some
sort of low-end, boxed-set, hobbyist/student/garage-operation kit market
represents a big shift away from what they appear to have experience with
and doing so could be a major disaster for their business. Hence, I wouldn't
presume to tell them what they ought to do here.

I would agree that there is probably some market for a low-end kit version
of Gnat. I'd buy one if I thought it had at least *some* of the features I
want & I could get the purchase order approved by "The Boss" :-) The
question would be, is it enough of a market to justify the costs necessary
to bring a product to it? I know of several hobbyists, small businesses,
entrepeneurs, etc., who purchase products such as MSVC++ for, at most, a few
hundred dollars and use them to develop whatever they are interested in
working on. They typically are satisfied with quarterly updates & a
newsletter and maybe some sort of chat forum for answering questions and/or
reporting bugs. However, they demand a much more complete and integrated kit
for the platform of interest. Putting together such a kit and support would
not be a trivial expense. Are there enough of these sorts of users who would
pay, say $29.95 for such a kit that the enterprise would profit? What would
their reservation price be? How many at $59.95? Or $299.95? That is the
million dollar question. How to find that out is a critical part of any
business plan.

MDC

--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"John McCabe" <john.mccabe@emrad.com.nospam> wrote in message
news:3bb05ee7.10496763@news.demon.co.uk...
>
> It is true that ACT are doing avery good job of satisfying many
> hobbyists using Ada. My view however is that they could do so *and*
> increase their revenue by marketing GNAT Learning Edition or something
> like that - i.e. CD, Full Installation instructions etc, and no (or
> minimal) support in the way that many of the Linux Distros are
> marketed these days. I paid around �50.00 for Mandrake Linux in a box
> but the last time I asked sales@gnat.com about an equivalent GNAT
> product I was told they didn't do one. They only sell support
> contracts based on a minimum number of seats. I would have been quite
> happy to pay up to say �50.00 for a boxed copy of GNAT, but it just
> wasn't available. If there are others like me then this is a market
> that ACT are simply ignoring yet which could provide additional
> capital to allow them to provide products at their own risk.
>