From ... From: Erik Naggum Subject: Re: Barriers to Lisp acceptance - a "survey" question Date: 1999/03/03 Message-ID: <3129456541194192@naggum.no> X-Deja-AN: 450743160 References: <7att2h$fpm$1@spitting-spider.aracnet.com> <7auptr$o7a$1@spitting-spider.aracnet.com> <920143667.2037628542@news.mindspring.com> <87ww12uqjh.fsf@2xtreme.net> <920305489.375875724@news.mindspring.com> <3129402021067482@naggum.no> mail-copies-to: never Organization: Naggum Software; +47 8800 8879; http://www.naggum.no Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp * Marco Antoniotti | At this point in time, I believe that the vendors have some pieces of | software well developed, which they actually charge premiums for | distribution. This is a repackaging cost. I wish these anti-vendor arguments could be a little more rational. of course they have some pieces of software well developed, like the entire Common Lisp system, the compiler, basically _everything_, right? the _purpose_ of charging for stuff that has paid for its development is to make it possible to respond to changes, continue to support customer needs, develop _new_ things, and/or to ensure financial independence for the founders or whatever. you don't appear to like this very much, but as soon as you come out saying that you don't believe in profits or in making money or in financial security or independence, business people _should_ turn deaf to your concerns and your suggested "solutions". prices are set in the market based on what people want to give for what they get, and if this has worked well, it's really hard to argue against the success. believe it or not, what you see today actually _works_, all the misgivings to the contrary notwithstanding. people make money and make good money doing what they are doing. you'll have to entice them with _more_ money now or even higher future earnings at reasonably low risk if you want to change their behavior. | I do not buy the argument that there are still development costs to | include CORBA support (or MK:DEFSYSTEM) in the standard distributions | (...) of Lispworks and MCL and ACL. it doesn't really matter that _you_ don't buy it. while it may change marketing impressions and cause loss of goodwill if you ignore somebody else's reality and try to force losses on them through the moral equivalent of strikes and boycotts, the rational way to deal with this is to convince whoever footed the development bill of your views, and then you show them enough respect to listen when they answer your claims. I'm in the business of selling software and my services to other people. I have done so for 15 years. in these years, I have donated thousands of hours of work to various causes that I believed in, some as a form of marketing, some as more important than personal gain, i.e., I wanted to create a better environment to work in rather than first reap the profits. over these years, what I have seen as the most astonishingly lacking in the demands and claims towards whoever should give people something is respect for their motivation. I can only surmise that the reason is that people don't ever stop to consider why _they_ are doing what they are doing, either. (and maybe that's good for them. :) | Not doing so is short-sighted, as KMP has correctly pointed out with | very good arguments. but who is he trying to convince? it doesn't matter that you agree with him, as long as _you_ are not the person making the decision to repackage or provide something for free. unlike what politicians believe, public sentiment doesn't actually and by itself change reality, it only changes how people will need to adapt to and change their experienced reality. if you deny them the right to affect their own reality, you engage in use of force, and you will therefore have to be treated as a hostile partner at best. a lot of people find such tactics to be uninspiring, to put it mildly. history is rife with people who stop doing whatever they were doing when somebody tried to force them to do stupid things, but usually, this happens to small businesses that just close shop when politicians try to force them into doing something that doesn't make sense to them. it actually doesn't help people change their ways into something more constructive to tell them that what they are doing is short-sighted or stupid. the best you can achieve with that tactic is that they stop doing whatever they are doing and go away to regroup or do something else. if you have a specific new behavior in mind, you have to motivate it inside the core premises of their existing behavior. punishment does not work constructively, has never worked constructively, and will never work constructively. you punish to destroy, and the only hope is that people have something else to do that is more constructive, but if you punish, that's none of your business. | Note also that at this point, giving away these freebies is *not* (or it | shouldn't be) a marketing gimmick. It is the only way to expand your | user base. Assuming that that is what you want to do. this is what marketing is all about. you seriously underestimate marketing if you think about their decisions and tools as "gimmicks". I suggest you guys make a solid business case for what you believe in, complete with market research and solid statistical groundwork, and I can promise you that you will be surprised by the reaction. if you don't, you're basically asking people to take your word for it and risk money on sentiments that are openly hostile to making money the way they do now. note that I'm not saying that I disagree with any of your issues, but I'm _not_ whining about it on a newsgroup with a user-only "I need, so gimme" focus when I want a vendor to change his ways. I also think your anti- business whining could make my own efforts fail or make them harder, and since I get everything I want, anyway, the question "why should I help whiners who make things harder for me?" may soon require an answer. #:Erik