Re: The Hobby Lobby was Windows CE?

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

A fair observation. As I said, the first part of the problem is *relatively*
easy and simply requires the application of large amounts of money. We could
clearly get a consumer-oriented Ada development environment constructed and
we could clearly get it into stores alongside MSVC++. How much money is
involved and would it generate sufficient return are fair questions, but it
is at least feasable.

The hard part, as I noted, would be to overcome the reticence of software
types to adopt Ada as their language of implementation. Too many people have
a bad attitude towards Ada (although I think this is diminishing) and too
many programmers want something that looks & feels like C and dislike Ada
because of its strictness, etc. Could a consumer oriented product with an
appropriate advertising campaign overcome these attitudes? Would the cost of
doing so exceed the profits to be reaped?

As for ObjectAda failing in the consumer market, I'll say this: I bought a
copy of it several years ago on company funds and it ran about $700. If I
had to pay for it out of my own pocket with no particular purpose in mind
beyond casual hacking at home, I wouldn't (and didn't). That's a pretty
steep price tag for the student or casual hacker who has to work for a
living. There were other problems with it, but I think the chief one was the
price was a bit beyond the consumer market.

Suppose something similar was available for a price tag of under $100? For
your money, you got a disk, a couple of manuals, a book, and an e-mail
address to answer installation/startup problems. (There shouldn't ought to
be any installation problems!) For an additional fee, you could subscribe to
a service that allowed you to report bugs & get quarterly updates. A kit
such as this would be within the reach of the consumer and would provide a
sufficient level of support for the average user. That *might* stand a
chance of succeeding. ObjectAda messed up in terms of the consumer's
reservation price and in some technical ways as well.

Now is there a marketing model that would let you circumvent the
brick-and-mortar stores that would demand you pay them for shelf space?
That's tough. They can demand the price because that shelf space is of huge
value to you. The guy who is scanning the shelves to find some computer game
sees your compiler kit and makes an impulse buy. (That's why you *must* have
the price low enough to overcome any "Let me go home and think about
spending that kind of money..." thoughts.) The internet might be a useful
way of distributing the kit, but how do you get that exposure to the
consumer who doesn't read C.L.A?

I'd love to hear any ideas anyone had about it, but this problem is not
unique to Ada and there are lots of dotcoms that became dotgones trying to
figure it out.

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/


"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:RBrs7.6406$ev2.11556@www.newsranger.com...
>
> You also have to pay out the proper bri^H^H^Henducements to retailers if
you
> hope to put physical copies on store shelves. That's one of the things
that
> tripped up OA.
>
> I'd think a study of how the Linux resellers got into this market would be
in
> order.
>