Creating markets (long)

Creating markets (long)

[Michael Feldman]

The recent posts from Jim Thomes, Jean Ichbiah, John Goodsen, and others
from time to time, about Ada's "small market" characteristics have
really started me thinking about whether, indeed, markets can be created.

I am convinced that they not only _can_ be created, but it happens all
the time. All one needs to do is look at the incredible variety of stuff
available in any retail store, especially in foods and cosmetics, but
also in other areas.

Large food and cosmetic companies sink tremendous resources into inventing
products, test-marketing them, running focus groups, developing ad
campaigns, etc. If L'Oreal, Chanel, General Mills, and Kellogg's waited
for hordes of customers to write the specs for their products, they
would be out of business pretty fast. Inventing new products, then
convincing folks to buy them who never knew they needed them, is indeed
the very essence of retail-oriented business.

This approach has been so successful that some industries are now using
"counter-advertising" (if I can coin a phrase) techniques, to try to
convince the public that these companies _didn't_ create a market.
The two that come to mind are

(1) the tobacco industry, which - under pressure for targeting young
    folks, minorities, and other "target" groups - has taken to
    advertising that "all" they are doing is providing a _choice_ of
    cigarette to people who have already _decided_ to smoke. Whether
    or not you believe this is a disingenuous ploy designed to get
    the FDA off their backs (I do...), it is certainly a change in
    advertising. They insist that thre is limitless demand for their
    products, which they had _nothing_ to do with creating. Yeah, right.

(2) a certain brand of chewing gum (I forget which) that, recently,
    has advertised essentially "it's a new kind of gum _for people who
    chew gum._" Right. Dentyne, Chiclets, Freedent, and others, had
    _nothing_ to do with creating this huge demand for gum. Sure.

Think of the scented, sexy pictures that arrive tucked into every
issue of every magazine. Naturally the makers of these perfumes (to
which a friend of mine is horribly allergic!) have _nothing_ to do with
this huge demand for perfume. They just sat back and waited for the crowds
to arrive, then satisfied their insatiable demand for smelly mag inserts.

Let's switch to the software business. Do you think that millions of
mainframe users were rioting in the streets because of an unfilled
need for an Apple II electronic spreadsheet? Of _course_ not. The
VisiCalc developers had a neat idea, worked it through to fruition,
then marketed and sold the hell out of it, creating not only a market
for their own product, but also for the Apple II, making it a plausible 
computer for business (this was years before the IBM PC).

Now to the Ada business. I can bore you all day with anecdotes, but will
limit myself to one that I think encapsulates the attitude. A certain 
Ada compiler vendor, asked about making some additional investments in 
their Mac compiler, responded "How many Ada programmers do you know
that use Macs?" (This was before Apple shifted its allegiance to C++
and was pushing Pascal as the main developer language.)

Does this answer seem as backward to you as it did to me? A market
orientation, it seems to this academic, would have led them to ask 

"How many Mac programmers are there in the industry? 
"How many college students are cutting their programming teeth on Mac 
   Pascal? 
"How can we capture a share for Ada of the overall Mac developer market? 
"Will capturing Mac programmers with an Ada compiler lead them to
   demand Ada even if they move to other platforms?
"Is developing a compiler that would grab those programmers and students, 
   blowing the doors off the competition, within our financial grasp?"

Instead, they asked how many Ada programmers use Macs. The answer _had_
to be "nearly none", because the Ada compiler for Macs was nearly unknown 
in the Mac community. Doesn't this seem bizarre to you?

I would get off the vendors' case for good if they would show some
intellectual honesty, and step forward and say "OK, guys, we blew it;
let's put our heads together on how not to blow it again."

Instead we get bleating from a few vendors about how _Uncle Sam_ blew
it (whenever anything goes wrong in this country, the government is
supposed to fix it), and dead silence on the matter from the rest.

SURE, Uncle Sam blew it. What surprises me about that fact is that
it should surprise anyone. Did the Ada community REALLY not see it
coming? (Well, some of us did.)

One quote from the note from John Goodsen: "Borland was making Pascal
compilers for mass use on PC's." That is a true statement. Breathes
there an Ada company that made a compiler for mass use? Nope. They
were so focused on the government's mandate that it never occurred
to them how they could leverage all their great stuff out to the masses.
We all managed to talk ourselves into a few non-facts:

(1) Ada is DIFFERENT from other languages. REALLY different.
(2) Mere mortals could NEVER learn to get good at it, or even get their
    arms around it. College freshmen? Forget it.

Hardly a day goes by that I don't get an e-mail note from an undergraduate
somewhere in the world, usually a place I didn't think had any interest
in Ada. "Thanks for doing GW-Ada/Ed, Mike," they say. "Now we see why
you advocates think Ada is such a great thing." There are _masses_ out
there using this thing; it has exceeded my wildest expectations.
And it's only a toy, as we all know. 

Sure, the fact that GW-Ada/Ed is free has something to do with it. 
Absolutely. But I get notes asking about interfacing to system calls,
graphics libraries, and the like. All those bindings we keep talking
about. "No," I say, "for that you ought to buy a commercial compiler;
the student prices are comparable to Borland's."

Rational, Alsys, AETECH: the market is ALL yours. We created it for you.
GW-Ada/Ed has propagated like (excuse the expression) a virus. It
runs out of steam pretty fast; it was _intended_ to run out of steam.

There is a thirst for industrial-strength compilers for the masses.
Are you ready to capture that market? The demand is there. Where is
the supply?

Can Debbie Weber-Wulff be correct, that the Open Ada compilers are
no longer sold to students in Germany? In which other countries
is this true? Is it true in the US?

Cheers -

Mike Feldman
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5253 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)
"Pork is all that stuff the government gives the other guys."
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Creating markets (long)

[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).

Re: Creating markets (long)

[Roger Labbe]

As a former student who was directly influenced both by 
educational compiler discounts and later a grad student who
took courses with Michael Feldman, I'd like to support his
argument with one example.

As a student undergrad between 84-88, I was able to buy 
a borland Pascal and a borland C compiler for around $35.
Although C was not explicitly taught at our college (Clarkson U.)
a lot of my classmates (and myself) learned C and subsequently
got employment as C programmers. I tried to learn Ada at the
time but the only compiler on campus was a VERY slow compiler
on a unix machine that took 10 minutes to compile a hello
world program (no exageration). Needless to say I never learned
Ada.

In grad school I was exposed to Ada by Mike Feldman. Incidentally,
his lectures sound a lot like his posts! Anyway, after being
exposed to some decent Ada compilers and doing a parallel 
processing project for a Seminar w/ Feldman, I quit my
current job (doing C work) and got a job doing real time Ada work.

So I agree with him, at least for my case, that
1) exposure to languages in college does translate to jobs and
acceptance in the workplace. While I have not yet had the
responibility/opportunity to select a language to develop
a project, that will come in time.

2) educational discounts do influence language choices. I know
a lot of people who picked up a cheap C compiler in school and
ended up working in C after graduation. I don't know anyone
who has picked up a $500 Ada compiler on a whim and then gotten
a job developing Ada.

I don't blame the world for going to C/C++. If it wasn't for
going to GW I would have never given Ada another thought. I
certainly wouldn't be picking up a $500+ compiler to play with
at home. Most people I meet who don't know Ada have mostly
negative connotations of it: too big, too clumsy, who need types
anyway, too slow, designed by a city, etc. These people won't
be choosing Ada for new projects. Certainly the people I know
who graduated from Clarkson and who have no Ada experience have
no plans to learn or use the language.

Finally, I'm giving a lot of thought of moving to C++ for
my next job. I don't want to program in this language, but
I do want some job security. I live in DC and most of the
jobs in the paper each weekend are for C/C++, not Ada. 
The people from my current job who went to other employers
did get Ada jobs, but they are all working on DoD projects
for defense contractors, and they all went (except one) to
the same 2-3 companies. Meanwhile the people I know in C are
getting calls by headhunters regularly for C/C++ jobs.
I don't think that an Ada market is just going to "happen"
because Ada is better.

Roger

Re: Creating markets (long)

[Michael Feldman]

In article <34tetc$dmk@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>, Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:

>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).

I think those of us who were around in the late 60s and early 70s all have
our opinions about what brought PL/I down. Recall that IBM also was hoping
that PL/I would displace _Fortran_. IMHO, they blew it by (gratuitously,
for those times) mapping multidimensional arrays row-major, thereby
crippling the ability to reuse "legacy" Fortran, which mapped column-major.

(I do not think there was any special technical reason to switch to row
major, nor were there row-major languages wiuth which PL/I had to
interface; that's why I said the PL.I design decision was gratuitous.)

It may be sheer coincidence, but I like to think that Ada 83's policy
of letting _implementers_ determine storage mappings was partially a response 
to this. A sharp implementer who wanted to penetrate the Fortran community 
could build a nice interface to legacy Fortran, uninhibited by a gratuitously
incompatible array mapping scheme.

Unfortunately, I don't think any implementers took this possibility seriously,
and as far as I know, Ada implementations all go row-major.

Ada 94's Interfaces.Fortran is taking this seriously, though. Of course,
the Fortran community has taken the ten years to develop the Fortran 
90 standard, which gives them yet another excuse to avoid Ada. Oh well.
(And gives the Ada vendors yet another excuse to avoid trying to
penetrate.)

Mike Feldman
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5253 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)
"Pork is all that stuff the government gives the other guys."
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Creating markets (long)

[Michael Feldman]

In article <dodger.779241464@ukelele>,
Roger Labbe <dodger@ukelele.gcr.com> wrote:

>In grad school I was exposed to Ada by Mike Feldman. Incidentally,
>his lectures sound a lot like his posts! Anyway, after being
>exposed to some decent Ada compilers and doing a parallel 
>processing project for a Seminar w/ Feldman, I quit my
>current job (doing C work) and got a job doing real time Ada work.

Another satisfied customer.:-)

Thanks for the plug, Roger! I remember you well. I'd like to think my
lectures have (a bit) more technical content than my netflames, 
though...:-)

Cheers -

Mike
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5253 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)
"Pork is all that stuff the government gives the other guys."
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Creating markets (long)

[Norman H. Cohen]

In article <34t6od$9mo@felix.seas.gwu.edu>, mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu
(Michael Feldman) writes: 

|> Now to the Ada business. I can bore you all day with anecdotes, but will
|> limit myself to one that I think encapsulates the attitude. A certain
|> Ada compiler vendor, asked about making some additional investments in
|> their Mac compiler, responded "How many Ada programmers do you know
|> that use Macs?" (This was before Apple shifted its allegiance to C++
|> and was pushing Pascal as the main developer language.)

It reminds me of the (fictional) story of the corporation offered the
opportunity to build the George Washington Bridge as a private
enterprise, and in return to receive the rights to all tolls collected.
The corporation observed that there were no cars currently driving across
the Hudson River between upper Manhattan and Ft. Lee, NJ, and concluded
that there was no market for the bridge.

--
Norman H. Cohen    ncohen@watson.ibm.com

Re: Creating markets (long)

[Richard Kenner]

In article <351m34$1706@watnews1.watson.ibm.com> ncohen@watson.ibm.com writes:
>It reminds me of the (fictional) story of the corporation offered the
>opportunity to build the George Washington Bridge as a private
>enterprise, and in return to receive the rights to all tolls collected.
>The corporation observed that there were no cars currently driving across
>the Hudson River between upper Manhattan and Ft. Lee, NJ, and concluded
>that there was no market for the bridge.

I heard a variant of this story, where the river was unnamed, the 
corporation was IBM, and the marketing study was done by placing a
boat in the center of the river and counting the number of people
swimming across.

Re: Creating markets (long)

[Michael Feldman]

In article <359ujr$ep@cmcl2.nyu.edu>,
Richard Kenner <kenner@lab.ultra.nyu.edu> wrote:
>In article <351m34$1706@watnews1.watson.ibm.com> ncohen@watson.ibm.com writes:
>>It reminds me of the (fictional) story of the corporation offered the
>>opportunity to build the George Washington Bridge as a private
>>enterprise, and in return to receive the rights to all tolls collected.
>>The corporation observed that there were no cars currently driving across
>>the Hudson River between upper Manhattan and Ft. Lee, NJ, and concluded
>>that there was no market for the bridge.
>
>I heard a variant of this story, where the river was unnamed, the 
>corporation was IBM, and the marketing study was done by placing a
>boat in the center of the river and counting the number of people
>swimming across.

"Why is there so little support for Ada on the Mac?"

"Good question, Mike. How many Ada programmers do _you_ know that use
Macs?"

I rest my case.

Mike Feldman
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)
NOTE NEW PHONE NUMBER.
"Pork is all that stuff the government gives the other guys."
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Creating markets (long)

[Robert Dewar]

How many Ada programmers do you know who use Macs?

Well that's a little misleading. THe very real marketing question you can
ask is how many developers or programmers use Macs in *any* language. THe
answer is very few, and going hand in hand with this is the observable
fact that the market for C compilers on the Mac is very small. It is no
surprise that a small slice of a very small pie is not very tasty. 

There is of course some value in the educational environment of Mac based
compilers, but as Mike likes to constantly remind us, educational folks
don't care to spend much money on software. For educational use, for 
example, GNAT on the MAC would be very nice, and it would be nice to see
it happen, but I would guess that "real" use of GNAT on the Mac would be
slim compared to other, more programming development oriented, systems.

And Mike, before you try to figure out how a company can make money selling
compilers to students, just remember that Borland is going broke, despite
the fact that it has an essentially massive control of the educational
compiler market. 

Re: Creating markets (long)

[James Hopper]

In article <35isl0$q6a@felix.seas.gwu.edu> Michael Feldman,
mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu writes:
>"Why is there so little support for Ada on the Mac?"
>
>"Good question, Mike. How many Ada programmers do _you_ know that use
>Macs?"


Well, i know of about 20 actually.  I also know that we don't buy 
tools for pc here unless they support both platforms.  if
we cant buy a product for both pc and mac we have made a decision to
buy unix tools instead as both can get to them using xwindows.

thus a vendor which does not support both platforms looses both
mac and pc sales here!  of course the unix vendors love this ;-)

Re: Creating markets (long)

[James Hopper]

In article <35j281$reo@gnat.cs.nyu.edu> Robert Dewar, dewar@cs.nyu.edu
writes:
>How many Ada programmers do you know who use Macs?
>
>Well that's a little misleading. THe very real marketing question you can
>ask is how many developers or programmers use Macs in *any* language. THe
>answer is very few, and going hand in hand with this is the observable
>fact that the market for C compilers on the Mac is very small. It is no
>surprise that a small slice of a very small pie is not very tasty. 
>
>There is of course some value in the educational environment of Mac based
>compilers, but as Mike likes to constantly remind us, educational folks
>don't care to spend much money on software. For educational use, for 
>example, GNAT on the MAC would be very nice, and it would be nice to see
>it happen, but I would guess that "real" use of GNAT on the Mac would be
>slim compared to other, more programming development oriented, systems.
>
>And Mike, before you try to figure out how a company can make money
selling
>compilers to students, just remember that Borland is going broke, despite
>the fact that it has an essentially massive control of the educational
>compiler market. 


Robert,

Your posts are usually very informative and factual.  But on the issue
of the Mac you are somewhat misinformed.  If there is such a small
market for c compilers on the mac [and programmers in general] how is
a small company like Metrowerks getting venture capitol to start up
in the mac compiler market.  their c, c++, and pascal compielrs have 
taken the  mac world by storm!  Very few programmers on the mac is
somewhat overstated, I don't have any numbers but i know in our company
the mac vs pc camp is about 50/50 among software folks here in dayton.
and from what i can see around the country that ratio is not to
far off nationwide. i teach our SW requiremetns course so i talk to a lot
of
our SW people around the country.  I also do a certain amount of work
with other companies who buy our radar sims and i find that while 50/50
is high the mac is hardly an insignifigant presence in the 
DOD market.  The powermac is also changing this as well.  I was at one
large company where one division was phasing out macs pretty fast 
then when the powermac came out they bought a boat load of them to
put on everyones desks and passed the pc's off to other divisions.

In addition i note that a lot of influential book authors/lectures
like
	Ed Yourdan, Peter Coad, Grady Booch, Rumbaugh, our own Mike Feldman,
	others all either use Macs preferentially or make public comments
	in support of them. 
	
I don't have to be developeing code for the mac to be developing code
one the mac.  In fact despite the fact that we do do a lot of mac
development
only a small part of our people actually write mac code. In fact i have
written code for the pc, the sun, SGI, and a couple of embedded processors
on the mac.

Climbing down off my soapbox now! ;-)

best jim

Re: Creating markets (long)

[Michael Hagerty]

On 18 Sep 1994, Robert Dewar <dewar@CS.NYU.EDU> wrote:

<snip>

RD> And Mike, before you try to figure out how a company can make money
  > selling compilers to students, just remember that Borland is going
  > broke, despite the fact that it has an essentially massive control
  > of the educational compiler market.

I am not sure, but I seriously doubt that Borland is going broke because
of their compiler business and its success in the educational market.  I
would think that their rampant business buying program of the past
several years is more at fault.  After all, one does not have to buy too
many companies only to orphan their products before you have a real big
cash-flow problem.

Let's count the orphans:  Sprint, Brief, TurboBASIC, ObjectVision, ...
And certainly count in the huge payout to A-T for dBASE right after the
court said that the dBASE language (previously considered a major asset)
was "public domain"...

All in all, Borland's failures seem to be more in areas other than their
mainline Pascal and C++ compiler products, which still seem to be very
successful in both the educational and non-educational markets; rather
it appears to be the injudicious "investment" of the money they were
making from the compiler business...

Regards, Mikey
---
Michael Patrick Hagerty, Computer Sciences Corp.    | mhagerty@fnoc.navy.mil
Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center | Phone:  (408) 656-4456
7 Grace Hopper Ave, Stop 1, Monterey, CA 93943-5501 | FAX:    (408) 656-4313

         "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend;
          inside a dog, it's too dark to read..."  Groucho Marx

Re: Creating markets (long)

[Michael Feldman]

In article <35k5f5$h4k@dayuc.dayton.saic.com>,
James Hopper  <hopperj@dayton.saic.com> wrote:

>>"Good question, Mike. How many Ada programmers do _you_ know that use
>>Macs?"

>Well, i know of about 20 actually.  I also know that we don't buy 
>tools for pc here unless they support both platforms.  if
>we cant buy a product for both pc and mac we have made a decision to
>buy unix tools instead as both can get to them using xwindows.

>thus a vendor which does not support both platforms looses both
>mac and pc sales here!  of course the unix vendors love this ;-)

Good policy, IMHO.

The point of my sardonic remark about was, of course, that they have it
backwards. The question should have been "How many Mac programmers
could we entice into using Ada?" But true to form, they didn't see
the potential. It's probably too late now, but when Pascal and C
were fighting it out for the loyalty of Mac developers, Ada had a
chance. Once Apple decided Pascal was dead and C++ was the politically
correct (PC in both senses :-)) language, thre was no hope.

Stories were afoot at the time that Apple was, at one point, interested
in there being a good Ada system for the Mac, but they were not
able to reach agreement witht the Ada vendors on how to make it happen.
Don't ask me for details; I don't recall at this point, except that
Apple was talking semi-seriously to somebody in the Ada industry
but they just could not comes to terms. Oh well.

Mike Feldman
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)
NOTE NEW PHONE NUMBER.
"Pork is all that stuff the government gives the other guys."
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Creating markets (long)

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) writes:
>The point of my sardonic remark about was, of course, that they have it
>backwards. The question should have been "How many Mac programmers
>could we entice into using Ada?"

In support of Michael Feldman's basic point, I would argue that even he
is asking the wrong question.  The right question is "how many Ada/Mac
compilers can we sell", and the question we can derive from that is
"how many programmers can we persuade to use Ada-on-the-Mac"?  You don't
just want to sell Ada to existing Mac users, you want to sell the Mac
idea to existing Ada users, and you want to sell the Ada-on-a-Mac idea
to existing QuickBASIC-on-a-PC users amongst many many others.

>Don't ask me for details; I don't recall at this point, except that
>Apple was talking semi-seriously to somebody in the Ada industry
>but they just could not comes to terms. Oh well.

Oh, well, I suppose the bright side is that if there _had_ been a
popular Ada/Mac, Apple might never have decided to start the Dylan project.

-- 
"The complex-type shall be a simple-type."  ISO 10206:1991 (Extended Pascal)
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~ok; RMIT Comp.Sci.

Re: Creating markets (long)

[Michael Feldman]

In article <35j281$reo@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>, Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>How many Ada programmers do you know who use Macs?
>
>Well that's a little misleading. THe very real marketing question you can
>ask is how many developers or programmers use Macs in *any* language. THe
>answer is very few, and going hand in hand with this is the observable
>fact that the market for C compilers on the Mac is very small. It is no
>surprise that a small slice of a very small pie is not very tasty. 

Sigh...we've been around this loop many times, Robert. The question 
above was posted sarcastically - some Ada vendor asked me this - with a
straight face - many years ago. That person had no answer to my rejoinder
that the question was posed backwards, and should have been "How many
Mac programmers and potential Mac programmers are there, and would they
use Ada if they could?" In the days before Apple switched its loyalties
to C++ from Pascal, Ada could have been as much a player as anything else.

Several stories I heard at the time suggested that Apple even approached
the Ada vendors at that time, apparently wanting to make a deal of
some kind, but were rebuffed. We can all speculate on the reasons;
my own speculation is my standard one: the vendors were _so_ focused on
the DoD market that they could not see the potential.

>There is of course some value in the educational environment of Mac based
>compilers, but as Mike likes to constantly remind us, educational folks
>don't care to spend much money on software. For educational use, for 
>example, GNAT on the MAC would be very nice, and it would be nice to see
>it happen, but I would guess that "real" use of GNAT on the Mac would be
>slim compared to other, more programming development oriented, systems.

Well, given that the C++-based development systems (Symantec and MetroWerks 
in particular) are now _throughly_ entrenched, I'm afraid I'll have to agree
both that Ada is not a contender on the Mac, and that GNAT will be used
much more on "bigger" platforms.

But we will have to agree to disagree on my assertion that the Ada
companies missed an opportunity that they cannot now recover. The Mac
market may be smaller than the PC market, but it is still large enough
for e.g. MetroWerks to make money in. 

_Someone_ is writing all those nice Mac packages, and they don't _have_ 
to be in C++, but of course the Ada vendors, having blown the chance to 
be in on the ground floor in the early days, guaranteed that this stuff 
surely won't be written in Ada.

>And Mike, before you try to figure out how a company can make money selling
>compilers to students, just remember that Borland is going broke, despite
>the fact that it has an essentially massive control of the educational
>compiler market. 

Ah, but the Ada vendors have something Borland does not: coverage of
a number of platforms. Yes, I know code generators don't come for free,
but the Mac is not _that_ different from other 68k machines. Borland,
having cast its lot with DOS and its children, cannot hook the students
on their little DOS-box compilers and then move them up to the "real"
machines when those kids get into industry. On the other hand, Alsys
could have done so. But as we know, Alsys never took the Mac product
seriously (or perhaps dumped it when an expected contract did not 
materialize) and _certainly_ did not take students seriously until '91.

Borland may be going broke, but, as you point out so eloquently, it is
going broke _in spite of_ its university relationships, not _because_
of them. There are only X many PC developers; eventually the market
saturates, and Borland has nowhere to go because it does not support
the "bigger" platforms.

Back to my original question - hook the students on Ada on their Macs
and PCs, and they will demand it in industry on their Suns and HPs
and DECs and SGIs. "How many Mac programmers can we bring to Ada?"
THAT would've been, IMHO, the _right_ question. Instead, the vendors
were mostly interested in whether the _existing_ Ada programmers used
Macs. They got it backward, Robert.

Let's move on to other things - you and I have been saying this stuff
to each other for many years. You speculate; I speculate. Your speculation
is not necessarily more valid than mine. Let's give it a rest.

Mike Feldman
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)
NOTE NEW PHONE NUMBER.
"Pork is all that stuff the government gives the other guys."
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Creating markets (long)

[Arthur Evans Jr]

In an on-going discussion about creating a market for Ada products on
the Mac, mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) wrote (among many other
things):

>                                                   ... the [Mac] Ada
> companies missed an opportunity that they cannot now recover. The Mac
> market may be smaller than the PC market, but it is still large enough
> for e.g. MetroWerks to make money in. 

How true.  MetroWerks seems to be a big player, and they have C, C++ and
Pascal products.  Why don't they have an Ada product?  Well, probably
because they don't perceive that a market exists for one.  Can we change
that perception?  Maybe.  But we can surely _try_ to change that
perception.

Tomorrow morning (I am writing this on Sunday), I will call APDA, the
part of Apple that sells software for developers, and ask about an Ada
compiler, from MetroWerks or anyone else.  I'll act surprised when I
learn that there isn't such a product and express my opinion that they
could sell it if it existed, and that I'm ready to place my order.  (I
am.)  APDA can be reached at 800-282-2732.

Next I'll try to reach MetroWerks.  I don't have their telephone number,
but I hope a bit of chasing around will reveal one.  Or, someone may
reply to this post with their number.  Again, I will express my strong
interest in an Ada product.

I'll also try MacConnection, my favorite mail-order house for software.
They are at 800-800-2222.

And what all you folks out there can do is the same thing.  That is, put
your money (10 or 15 minutes of your time) where your mouth is, and do
what you can to influence the _right_ folks that an Ada market _does_
exist on the Mac.  Let's try it.

Art Evans

Arthur Evans Jr, PhD        Phone: 412-963-0839
Ada Consulting              FAX:   412-963-0927
461 Fairview Road
Pittsburgh PA  15238-1933
evans@evans.pgh.pa.us
  

Re: Creating markets (long)

[Michael Feldman]

In article <35ogi3$a5r@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>,
Richard A. O'Keefe <ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> wrote:
>mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) writes:
>>The point of my sardonic remark about was, of course, that they have it
>>backwards. The question should have been "How many Mac programmers
>>could we entice into using Ada?"
>
>In support of Michael Feldman's basic point, I would argue that even he
>is asking the wrong question.  The right question is "how many Ada/Mac
>compilers can we sell", and the question we can derive from that is
>"how many programmers can we persuade to use Ada-on-the-Mac"?  You don't
>just want to sell Ada to existing Mac users, you want to sell the Mac
>idea to existing Ada users, and you want to sell the Ada-on-a-Mac idea
>to existing QuickBASIC-on-a-PC users amongst many many others.

Well, sure. The diehard Mac fan in me certainly won't dispute this
point. On the other hand, I'd have settled for the Ada companies
selling _Ada_, without worrying about selling Apple's hardware for
them. Now, had there been a _real_ alliance between Apple and an
Ada vendor, where each benefited from the other's involvement...

Sigh...pipe dreams...

Mike Feldman
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)
NOTE NEW PHONE NUMBER.
"Pork is all that stuff the government gives the other guys."
------------------------------------------------------------------------