Re: Vendor bashing? Sort of.

[ryer@dsd.camb.inmet.com (Mike Ryer)]

Just one additional point that bears on this discussion:  The existance of
the DOD Ada mandate may have attracted more companies to invest in Ada than
otherwise would have.  In the early days, there were at least ten separately
maintained root compiler technologies.  The Ada market has never been big
enough to maintain that many different front-end/optimizer/runtime 
frameworks.  If there had been no mandate, perhaps only one or two companies
would have invested in Ada compilers, each getting a bigger share and
having more money for continuing engineering, PR, university outreach, etc.
If the mandate had been enforced, there might have been enough business
to let all ten or so companies do everything right technically and in
the market.  Venture capital would be easier to get, and "Ada is good" 
advertising would be easier to justify if there were fewer competitors.
DOD's in-between position of claiming that there would be a mandate
but not really doing it increased the risk in everyone's investement.

Of course, there are a lot fewer vendors now, and rumor has it that the
newly-merged companies are cutting down to one core technology each.

In a classical create-a-market scenario, there is a single company that
owns the product and will get all of the revenue from the newly expanded
market.  When ten companies have the same idea at once, nine of them should
drop out :-)

The pet rock business is different from the socket wrench business.  People
who are good at one are not too likely to be good at the other.  I'm sort
of pleased that the engineers around here don't *want* to make pet rocks.

Still, here's my latest marketing gimmick.  Tell everyone you know:

     "Don't worry, there will be plenty of C maintenance work for
      those programmers who can't learn Ada".

Mike Ryer
(speaking only for myself