Franz Inc.in baskanindan onemli degerlendirmeler.
Kaynak: http://www.livejournal.com/users/hisashim/232542.html
----------------------------------8<------------------------------------
Secrets of Successful Programming Language Business
As I had a chance to talk with Mr. Fritz Kunze (President of Franz Inc.)
in the party after Franz's Lisp seminar today, I asked him a question,
that is:
What is the secret of successful language business?
I asked him because I remembered matz (a language designer, the author
of Ruby) wanted to know how to succeed in language business.
Fritz generously answered to my question, though the first thing he said
was that it's very hard to succeed in language business. His answer was
as follows if I recall correctly.
(Note that these are based on my distorted memory and not exactly what
they said. If there are anything that are not true, it's my fault.)
* Be a cult leader.
Programming language is a cult. It's a religion. Many programmers
stick to one language and do not change it for 50 years, their
entire career. So you have to be like a cult leader to gain a good
user base.
* Get a partner who is really good at marketing and sales.
You need a person who knows marketing and sales very well, even if
he/she has opinions contradictory to yours. Do not get a partner
who is a geek type like yourself, or you will miss the market.
Hire a nice and talented woman to maintain good public relations,
since your users / customers are geeks, and geeks do listen to
women but not much to men.
* Use a standardized language.
ANSI Common Lisp is a dirty language. But it is standardized. In
business, it's very important to be standardized. In a world of
standardized language, there are many vendors and implementations,
and they are compliant to the specification and interoperative.
Mr. Hisao Kuroda, the Head of Knowledge Engineering Devision at
MSI, took over and explained us why he would not use those new
scripting languages for his business. It's because they are not
languages but only implementations that lack written
specifications. He wants his application software to survive no
matter what happens to the implementations. It's not a matter of
preference but a matter of survival. So, write a specification.
* Be very lucky.
Language business is very hard. You need a very good luck to
survive.
Other interesting topics:
* It takes 15 years for a programming language to mature. It was
guaranteed that those venture companies in 90's which used Java
failed.
* Databases sells better than languages as product.
----------------------------------8<------------------------------------
--
roktas
_______________________________________________
cs-lisp mailing list
[email protected]
http://church.cs.bilgi.edu.tr/lcg
http://cs.bilgi.edu.tr/mailman/listinfo/cs-lisp
