Re: Creating markets (long)

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (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
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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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