On Wed, 09 Aug 2006 07:17:58 +0200, Todd Blanchard wrote:
Because the primary vendor for Smalltak - ParcPlace Systems, pursued a strategy of maximizing profit per user instead of profit overall. In its heyday, VisualWorks cost something like $3000 per user and so almost nobody could afford to learn it unless they could do it on the job at their employer's expense. Even the academic license was something like $500 - pretty steep for a student.
...
Java gained ground because anyone who wanted to try it could just download it and learn it. This wasn't possible with Smalltalk - so nobody learned it.
See, it was necessary to attach a very large price tag to Smalltalk for getting an idea of Java's value (value := price tag in this case ;-) Seriously, I believe this cause-and-effect.
At least, this is how things looked to me as an enterprise systems architect in the mid-1990's.
I agree, same experience here. But the story about VAST and COBOL was: sales rep #1 "what's this small talk thingy good for?"; sales rep #2 "replacing COBOL?!". The COBOL landscape was, by that time, the largest and replacing any COBOL system by anything else meant more $$$ for the sales rep than she/he could imagine to earn by selling something else.
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