Re: Incorporating 9X into Ada courses

[psinntp!witch!mlb!mbayern@uunet.uu.net (Mark Bayern)]

 
>I must say I find Feldman's comment on Ada pricing naive. All this talk of
>gouging tax payers reads well as rabble rousing to the gallery, but does it
>really make sense?
>

Sure does -- and I speak as one who is attempting to use Ada in the
commercial world.   

>The issue that faces an Ada company is where to price its products in a market
>whose elasticity is not known, but which is suspected to be much less than 1
>(i.e. halving prices will not as much as double sales), and of course in 
>practice the elasticity must be much greater than 1 if halving the price is
>to leave profits stable, let alone growing.
>
>As you know, a fair number of people have lost a lot of money betting on the
>Ada market. Now it may be that Ada companies have got the sums wrong, and that
>they would make more money if they reduced prices.
>
>However, when Mike says that "if an Ada company reduced prices and it didn't
>work they would lose the ability to gouge the taxpayers" he has got it 
>completely wrong. On the contrary, the penalty for such a misstep would almost
>certainly be that the company would fail. 
>

Completely wrong?  Nope.  Remember the FARs and DARs will require
the vendor to sell to the govt at their 'most favored customer'
price.  Once they lower the price to the commercial world they
will have to lower the price to the govt.  They then loose the
ability to 'gouge the taxpayers'. 

>As it is, several Ada companies have in effect failed (Alsys, Telesoft,
>Systeam), and certainly no one is getting rich in the Ada business. In a 

Well if Alsys is not gettting rich, maybe its because most
commercial projects don't want to pay $25K + 5K annual support for
a compiler.  C and C++ are available for _much_less_.

(I really shouldn't pick on Alsys, so far they've got the only Ada
system that runs reliably for my applications.)

Mark