Re: Vendor bashing? Sort of.

[srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian)]

>I really don't want to continue in this negative vein. We are all
>clearly in a bit of a mess now. Where do we go from here? Just
>bashing the government for blowing it on the mandate, and for
>supposedly making Ada 9X "too big" (though of course nobody wants
>_their_ features deleted...) will not get us very far. What next?
>
>Mike Feldman

    Simple.  Change DoD procurement regulations to give contractors incentives
to be as cost effective as possible.  Hard to sell (and build an Ada business)
to contractors who make the same amount of money as long as their performance
is not completely attrocious.  I would be happy to live with every idiotic
Ada policy out there if the DoD would just change its procurement regulations
to be more compatible with market practices.
    Example.  I once had a chance to help save a DoD contractor a few hundred
thousand dollars on a project they were working on by providing them with 
existing Ada code (instead of them having to write it from scratch).  My
charge would have been a few tens of thousands of dollars.  So the DoD saves
money, the contractor completes the contract quicker, and I make some more
money to live and invest in my Ada business.
    Unfortunately, the managers there weren't interested for two reasons.
First they wouldn't give their workers a charge number for one hour of time
for me to come in and make a presentation.  I don't mind being rejected after
you have heard my pitch, but at least let me make it.  Second, their bonuses
and company profits were fixed to a percentage of the contract size, so my
offer to save money translated in their heads to less bonus and profits, an
instant sales killer.
    All this talk about commercializing Ada is utterly pointless, like the
current DualUse plan, as long as these conditions prevail.  For the only way
new companies are goign to find the money to commercialize Ada in the
non-Mandated world (where the market is miniscule) is from the profits made
in the Mandated world.  But for ten years, other than for compiler sales,
this is been impossible.

    In fact, here is another statistic to be collected:  what is the annual
sales of reusable Ada components from businesses into the Mandated world,
as a fraction of DoD software procurement expenditures?

Greg AHaronian