Re: Vendor bashing? Sort of.

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

>Greg, let me get this right, you wanted to charge for an hour of time to
>come in and make a sales pitch? Well that's a novel way of doing business
>(well perhaps one should say it would be novel if it worked). Charging
>for sales pitches, well, well, that's the second strangest thing I heard
>about today (the first is too long a story ...)

Robert,
	Obviously you are unfamilar with DoD contracting procedures, which
is why you fail to appreciate how business-suffocating many Ada policies
are.  I did not mean (and if you bothered to read what I posted) to demand
to be paid for making a sales pitch.  Maybe that's what's expected at NYU,
but not here in Boston. I think your knee-jerking is getting out of control.


	Each and every hour of a DoD contractor's employees day has
to be accounted for to some contract (unless he is a non-peon on overhead).
This is much like lawyer's who have to bill every hour of their day to one
of their clients.  Thus for someone at a DoD contractor to goto the library
for an hour to look up information on Ada, that person has to charge that
hour to some contract, or he or she won't be able to go.  For if each hour
is not accounted for to some contract, and legitimately, then the DoD auditors
from the DCAA (or whatever it is called now) get real nasty (well only if 
they detect lots of inconsistencies).

	So when I wanted to make a pitch to help one such company save money
by using some Ada software I had referenced in my databases, for anyone at
that company to sit in on a presentation I wanted to give, they would have to
get permission from their manager to charge to some DoD contract their spending
one hour to listen to me.  In this case, the manager refused to do so, so
despite having a group of programmers interested in what I could offer for as
an Ada entrepreneur, I could not even get a chance to make my pitch.
	Why did the manager refuse?  As I said before, using my services would
have allowed them to save the taxpayers and the DoD lot of money on the
contract, but would have cut into the company's and manager's profits and
bonuses, under existing defense procurement regulations.  So why bother
listening to a sales pitch, no matter how relevant.

	In general, this happens all over the Ada world and is one of the 
main killers of third party Ada businesses.  Ada is a language designed to
help people save money over the software life cycle being thrown at DoD
contractors who have little incentives to save money over the software life
cycle.  

	Every three years or so this issue comes up in a public way, and then
gets ignored once again.  But until it is addressed, Ada commercialization is
impossible.  Without a chance to earn profits in the Mandated world to invest
into pushing Ada into the non-Mandated world, no one new is going to be
attracted to the DoD's DualUse activities, even if they were practical.

	I mean, where does the DoD expect the investments to come from to see
their DualUse plans succeed?  The lack of any financial figures in DISA's
DualUse plan is indicative of the lack of support by the DoD in funding new
Ada initiatives (especially with the tens and hundreds of millions it gives
to ARPA to commercialize everythign but Ada).  So DoD investments.  The Ada
vendors and contractors should little sign of investing the tens of millions
of dollars needed, for the same reason that venture capitalists won't make
such investments - any money invested in Ada could return much, much larger
profits if invested in C++ or Visual Basic.  So where else is the DualUse
investments going to come from?  One place would be from profits selling
into the Mandated world, but the procurement regulations (as above) get in
the way.

Greg Aharonian