Subject: Re: LispWorks status From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/11/05 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3150797161606822@naggum.no> * "Fernando D. Mato Mira" <matomira@iname.com> | In essence, I don't think it's right for people to go saying "use X (the | leader) because it's technically superior", failing to emphasize the fact | that vendor Y produces a product which is also good, and makes a serious | effort to try to adapt to the current market reality. the reason you don't think it's right is that you falsely and staunchly believe that "market reality" is a singularity. it isn't. "the market" is a collection of an enormous amount of conflicting considerations and needs. that's what makes it a market. what you are complaining about (and it is complaining since you don't talk to the people in question to have a problem _solved_, which is what I was alluding quite strongly to when I said WORK TOGETHER and hinting as best as I could that you aren't making any effort to do that -- now you are actively working AGAINST somebody's decisions) is that _some_ users or customers or would-be customers or you are unable or unwilling to express a business case for yourself. this is not somebody else's fault -- it is entirely your own problem that you are unable to convince somebody. taking it out on them in public is unfair and also stupid: it means people who listen to you will not want to make any deals with you, either, in case you are unable to get a deal you want out of them because that would mean you go public with your complaints. you are acting very unprofessionally with this issue. competitors have no reason at all to fight in the same market segments, by the way -- they frequently have a desire not to. so just because you are in one segment that is profitable and deemed more valuable to one vendor does not mean you have a case for somebody else to compete with them on their terms in your market segment. there are number of hard decision here for which I think you fail to appreciate the ramifications of making mistakes when making fairly arbitrary choices. it is always impossible to use hindsight as a criterion for decisions, but I'll tell you one thing, about a great Norwegian hardware maker that tried to break into the U.S. market with their decidedly superior hardware: they could not figure out how to price their products, so they went promiscuous and sold units to people with enormously varying prices. instead of being happy that you could get a great deal if you pushed hard enough or were big enough, they were virtually chased out of the market for dumping and unfair business practices. the principle at work is that people want to be able to have _certainty_ about your pricing model and how to influence it in whole or in part. this means that some people will not be able to get what they want because it would be detrimental to the vendor to be seen as unreliable. rather, a vendor and customer needs to WORK TOGETHER (there those words come up again) if they want special deals. royalties is ONE WAY of doing this, for CERTAIN market realities. if they can't or won't do it with royalites, they have to make the same money somehow. if you have a SUGGESTION to them for how to do that, one good way to do this would be to approach them and tell them about your grand new scheme that will make them loads of money. however, if all you are concerned about is getting a product at a lower price and you are not actually working with the concept of vendors making money, you're not dealing with ANY market reality, but are egoistically, short-sightedly worried about your own wallet, only, and as long as that is your only concern, nobody should listen to you, because there's never going to be anything in it for them. | I believe that one makes a better service to Lisp not by sharing profits | with the market leader, but by buying the `underdog' product, and in case | you reach a point where the implementation fails to suit your | requirements in some way, then switch to the other vendor. some people always think the "underdog" needs special treatment. I don't believe in underdogs. however, I do believe in special treatment where there are clearly long-term benefits that are hard to measure or realize with the standard shorter-term deals that reflect normal behavior. this is what working together means. how closely determines how special. however, if you don't want to work with the vendor, feel free to use a vendor that think this is normal, and by all means, use one that doesn't give you much support, either. there are lots of languages to choose from where you take all the responsiblity for everything yourself and where you pay for upgrades and incompatibilities and whatnot. I think such languages create a working-against environment between user and vendor, and my favorite company to dislike intensely for this is also the one company that people mistakenly assume is the singular market reality: anyone who chooses a different strategy should be chosen because they cause a much healthier market structure and better relationship between programmers in its chosen market segments. also, it seems unreasonably short-sighted to me that some programmers do not even look at the business side of their OWN work and realize that the less friendly their vendor, the more likely that they will have to work a lot harder with stuff that they are much less well equipped to handle well. my quality concerns are causing huge alarms to go off when I see people sit down and write their own database interconnection support (to take but one random item I have heard about) _primarily_ because they are pissed at the vendor's pricing model -- and if these guys are actively working against the vendor, I know that the vendor and the developers aren't communicating to their mutual best interest, which _I_ will pay for by not being able to upgrade one or the other, a situation which will be exacerbated exponentially with the number of such packages used this way. the same concern once prompted me to reject free software when it was obvious that there was a significant fight between vendors and the free software producers. that has changed considerably and free software is now _often_ better than commercial software (but not always), and some (hardware) vendors are judged based on how well they enable cooperation with free software producers. the only concern I have with any such deal is that the software that comes out of the process is trustable and that the parties involved are in it for the duration. otherwise, it's better for me to use something else if I'm in it for the duration. if not, and it's only a short-term thing for me, too, long-term quality assessment is a waste of time, and I'd immediately grab the cheapest product with zero royalty and no support or upgrade policy and then I'd see what to do when I want to make another quick buck. for some people, this is what constitutes "market reality", and I loathe them for it, because it makes it more expensive up front to get quality goods, yet so much easier to get cheap goods that cost more to own in the long run, which is a downward spiral that benefits only the cheap-product vendors, which are by this reasoning far from underdogs, but instead undercutters of a sustainable business environment. there is also a serious concern with companies whose assets are valuable enough to be salvaged from bankruptcies, but whose business strategies are not good enough to make the customers pay for their development: they instead make their creditors and investors pay for it. this is not good for anybody and it is particularly bad if a product whose development costs have been written off in this way are then very profitable to the vendor at _any_ price -- the result is that bankruptcy becomes a part of the _survival_ process of smaller companies and longevity becomes a joke. I'm not going to live forever, either, of course, but it always seemed to me that by optimizing so heavily for the short term, there would be an enormous waste over the course of several short terms, and since we're all going to live for quite some time, _only_ thinking about what is possible in the youth of any short term seems completely idiotic to me, yet that is what people seem to delight in. this leads me to wonder what values they actually get from what they are doing, but I'm digressing. #:Erik