[Newbies] Re: Why hasn't Smalltalk been wildly accepted?
Klaus D. Witzel
klaus.witzel at cobss.com
Wed Aug 9 05:45:56 UTC 2006
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.
/Klaus
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