Re: Creating markets (long)

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

A particular instance of market creation that is relevant these days is
Ada 9X. Early on I know of a couple of vendors who asked their users 
whether they were planning on using Ada 9X. Since most of them hadn't
heard about Ada 9X, they were NOT planning on using it. It is all to
easy to conclude from such data "none of our users are interested in
Ada 9X". 

Clearly this can be self-fullfilling, if you decide as a consequence not
to emphasize Ada 9X, then naturally, your Ada customers will continue
"not to be interested" in something they don't know about.

If we are going to get people to use Ada 9X, even among existing Ada users,
we indeed need to try to create a new market.

Note that's it's not necessarily easy. IBM put a huge amount of resources into
trying to promose PL/1 as a successor to COBOL, and clearly failed, although I
think some of this can be ascribed to lousy early implementations (the Sears
reversal was a watershed in this process).