Re: Creating markets (long)

[James Hopper <hopperj@dayton.saic.com>]

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