Re: Vendor bashing? Sort of.

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

"Naturally, we can all speculate forever on this point. But I find it one
of the more bizarre I've seen lately. If, indeed, Ada was a solid and
sound design for its times, why on earth would nobody have been willing
to invest in its development, even if the DoD did not sound like it would
mandate use?"

Yes, well there are two big mistakes that non-business oriented technical
people make. First, they think that being technically best is a guarantee
of success, and second, they think that not being technically best is a
recipe for failure. Mike, there are dozens of companies around that have
been destroyed by technically oriented management that did not understand
how relatively unimportant technical superiority ranks on the scale of
things.

Such matters as perceived and actual levels of support, estimation of
financial soundness of the companies involved, size of the companies
involved, time to market, etc. etc often play a much larger role.

If you think of Modula-2 and Modula-3 as commercial successes which you
are sad that Ada was not able to emulate, then you really have a peculiar
view of the market. 

Mike, there is an easy experiment you can perform now. See if you can
get any venture capitalist to put up money to support work on Ada 9X.
All I can say is good luck if you try this! To be fair, you should inform
the venture capitalists that you do not expect the mandate to be maintained,
and they should discount the effect of the mandate in estimating the future
market potential of Ada. 

I am certainly not saying that you can succeed with rubbish products, no
matter how good other things look (consider IBM's failures with the
PC Jr and the RT as illustrations of this). Equally, there are cases where
a product really *does* succeed on technical excellence alone, but they
are few and far between.