RE: the Ada mandate, and why it collapsed and died (was): 64 bitaddressing and OOP

["Beard, Frank Randolph CIV" <frank.beard@navy.mil>]

-----Original Message-----
From: soft-eng [mailto:softeng3456@netscape.net]
>> 
>> Observation suggests that good software products do not necessarily
>> become popular; and the methods and processes adopted in successful
>> software projects do not necessarily get widely imitated. 

> Where do you get this?  People in the industry adopt what
> they see succeeding.

Just because it's succeeding doesn't mean it's a quality product.
I could write for weeks about exceptions to this.  The are so many
things that succeed because they are cheap, not quality.  People 
just seem to accept the fact they shouldn't expect too much out of it.
They're willing to take a gamble, and put up with some inconvenience
or inferiority, just to save some money.  I'm guilty of it.

I get tired of people making the cheap choice and then suing because
it failed, when no one should have been surprised.

M$ Windows 3.0 was buggy and crashed often, yet it succeeded.  Why,
because it was cheaper than Apple/Macintosh, which was/is a superior
product.  I use to use Mac's at work, and I loved them, but I wasn't
willing to spend double the price of a Windows PC to have one at home.
Although Windows continues to improve (95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, and now XP),
it's still far from quality.  Our NT and 2000 systems have to be rebooted
fairly frequently.  I will say XP is about as close to a Mac as Windows
has ever been.  I use XP but I haven't done any development on it so far,
so I'm not familiar with those problems yet.

But my point is, MS Windows was/is much more successful than Apple
Macintosh, despite the fact it's an inferior product.

Frank