Vendor bashing? Sort of.

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <35517g$8um@schonberg.cs.nyu.edu>,
Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>Mike, to your claim that Ada companies bet on sales to the DoD under the
>Mandate. Poppycock! at least if you are talking about all companies. ALsys
>was a French company which always had far more employees in France than
>in the US, and concentrated on sales in Europe where there is no mandate.

OK, Alsys excepted. I still think it's pretty much the case that even
Alsys saw its competition as coming from other Ada companies, not other
languages. Conceivably they did not feel this way (I wasn't on the
inside of course), but to an outsider, they surely acted like it.
You may simply have been too close to those companies (at that time)
to see them as an outsider did. "Where you stand depends on where you sit."

>Alsys has shifted its emphasis somewhat with the Telesoft merger, but I
>would still be willing to bet that a big part of its revenue comes from
>non-DoD sources (including such US customers as NASA and Boeing commercial).

I think that's probably true.

>As for the claim that the mandate is responsible for the perceived poor
>quality of Ada tools (a broad brush characterization that is not at all
>generally fair -- there are good Ada tools and bad Ada tools around), I
>know this is a popular view from the vendor-bashers club of which you
>seem to be one of the founding members, but apart from a lot of rhetoric,
>I have never seen any convincing argument that this is the case.

Well, I guess you have to count me into the vendor-bashers. I can't say
whether it was the mandate _per se_ that inhibited the tools; maybe it
was just that these companies did not see who the real competition was,
and Alsys was looking over its shoulder (mostly) at Verdix and TeleSoft
(the same can be said for Verdix and TeleSoft) and not at the other
languages/environments. Not until they were too locked in to easily
extricate themselves.

Of course this is the view of an outsider - I'm not part of the "inner
circle" - and _certainly_ wasn't in the 83-90 timeframe. I can only
reason from actions.

>In fact, you could well argue that the failure of vendors to generate
>sufficient revenue to support continued improvement etc was due to the
>mandate not being enforced well enough, although that's also a hard
>after-the-fact argument to make convincingly.

I agree, though it is plausible. But I say again that seeing the DoD
as the primary market, and (I presume) soliciting investment on that 
basis and not on Ada's promise as a broader product, was the mistake.
It is easy to say this in hindsight, which is always 20-20. But I and
others were saying it back in 85-86-87 too, and we were dismissed with
a wave of the hand as being hopelessly out of touch. We actually predicted
pretty well what the outcome would be, considering that we were not on 
the inside. So who was out of touch? We were in fact thinking much bigger
than competing with just other Ada companies.

>There - that should start a nice thread of diatribe. Perhaps I should
>have changed the subject line to something more flamboyant :-)

I changed it.

As I said in a previous post: I will get off the vendors' case for good
if they step forward and say "OK, we blew it; where do we go from here?
you guys were at least partially right, so we are listening now." But
as you and I have discussed privately, there's not much chance of this
happening, because the vendors seem to spend much of _their_ time DoD-
bashing instead of opening up markets.

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."
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