From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_DATE autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,ffce418d7a49585f X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1994-09-19 02:38:07 PST Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Path: bga.com!news.sprintlink.net!redstone.interpath.net!ddsw1!news.kei.com!world!srctran From: srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) Subject: Re: Vendor bashing? Sort of. In-Reply-To: dewar@cs.nyu.edu's message of 16 Sep 1994 20:11:58 -0400 Message-ID: Sender: srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) Organization: The World References: <355o58$isa@felix.seas.gwu.edu> <35au0c$imd@felix.seas.gwu.edu> <35dc8e$t7h@gnat.cs.nyu.edu> Date: Sun, 18 Sep 1994 14:02:14 GMT Date: 1994-09-18T14:02:14+00:00 List-Id: >Greg, let me get this right, you wanted to charge for an hour of time to >come in and make a sales pitch? Well that's a novel way of doing business >(well perhaps one should say it would be novel if it worked). Charging >for sales pitches, well, well, that's the second strangest thing I heard >about today (the first is too long a story ...) Robert, Obviously you are unfamilar with DoD contracting procedures, which is why you fail to appreciate how business-suffocating many Ada policies are. I did not mean (and if you bothered to read what I posted) to demand to be paid for making a sales pitch. Maybe that's what's expected at NYU, but not here in Boston. I think your knee-jerking is getting out of control. Each and every hour of a DoD contractor's employees day has to be accounted for to some contract (unless he is a non-peon on overhead). This is much like lawyer's who have to bill every hour of their day to one of their clients. Thus for someone at a DoD contractor to goto the library for an hour to look up information on Ada, that person has to charge that hour to some contract, or he or she won't be able to go. For if each hour is not accounted for to some contract, and legitimately, then the DoD auditors from the DCAA (or whatever it is called now) get real nasty (well only if they detect lots of inconsistencies). So when I wanted to make a pitch to help one such company save money by using some Ada software I had referenced in my databases, for anyone at that company to sit in on a presentation I wanted to give, they would have to get permission from their manager to charge to some DoD contract their spending one hour to listen to me. In this case, the manager refused to do so, so despite having a group of programmers interested in what I could offer for as an Ada entrepreneur, I could not even get a chance to make my pitch. Why did the manager refuse? As I said before, using my services would have allowed them to save the taxpayers and the DoD lot of money on the contract, but would have cut into the company's and manager's profits and bonuses, under existing defense procurement regulations. So why bother listening to a sales pitch, no matter how relevant. In general, this happens all over the Ada world and is one of the main killers of third party Ada businesses. Ada is a language designed to help people save money over the software life cycle being thrown at DoD contractors who have little incentives to save money over the software life cycle. Every three years or so this issue comes up in a public way, and then gets ignored once again. But until it is addressed, Ada commercialization is impossible. Without a chance to earn profits in the Mandated world to invest into pushing Ada into the non-Mandated world, no one new is going to be attracted to the DoD's DualUse activities, even if they were practical. I mean, where does the DoD expect the investments to come from to see their DualUse plans succeed? The lack of any financial figures in DISA's DualUse plan is indicative of the lack of support by the DoD in funding new Ada initiatives (especially with the tens and hundreds of millions it gives to ARPA to commercialize everythign but Ada). So DoD investments. The Ada vendors and contractors should little sign of investing the tens of millions of dollars needed, for the same reason that venture capitalists won't make such investments - any money invested in Ada could return much, much larger profits if invested in C++ or Visual Basic. So where else is the DualUse investments going to come from? One place would be from profits selling into the Mandated world, but the procurement regulations (as above) get in the way. Greg Aharonian