Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

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

Part of it was that they refused for *years* to do anything about Unix and
only started heading in that direction when it appeared that they might sink
unless they did. They wanted to keep pushing VMS - which might have been a
good thing, but they also weren't willing to take the steps necessary to
make VMS "The Operating System" (such as make it executable on more than a
VAX or Alpha platform and license it easily to the rest of the world. Sort
of the Apple "I want the whole pie" strategy to achieve business demise.)

But it is a perfect example of getting to the market too late. Others had
established dominance in the Unix field and DEC was just there with too
little too late. Ada is free to make exactly the same mistake. "Gee.
Everyone is jumping on C++ and the STL and the Java class libraries and
other large libraries of stuff. Maybe we should try to get containers into
the standard five years from now....." Sounds to me like a recepie for too
little too late.

MDC
--
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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
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Robert Spooner <rls19@psu.edu> wrote in message
news:3DFA00D5.9010307@psu.edu...
> >
> This is a good point.  From my vantage point, one of the big mistakes
> Digital Equipment Corp. (remember them?) made with their version of UNIX
> was
> that they didn't release it until if was up to (or at least close to)
> their reliability standards.  That put them in a bad competitive
> position, and we all know what happened subsequently.  I'm not saying
> the demise of DEC was solely due to that, but I think it was a
> contributing factor.
>