Welcome Ron!

On Oct 1, 2005, at 4:25 AM, Ron Teitelbaum wrote:
> The foundation needs very experienced business people, some  
> promotions and education focused to encourage corporate acceptance,  
> and a solid and growing user community producing a strong capable  
> business development platform.  We all know that smalltalk is just  
> as capable (if not more) but the business world, and it’s  
> consultants like Gartner Group, sees us as risky.
yes, I'd really like to see (more) common actions of people using  
Squeak professionally (its certainly good to become a supporting  
company at SqueakFoundation but if we also manage to do real actions,  
that is even better!). There are certainly a couple of companies that  
mainly do Squeak development - I guess, most in the Seaside area. I'm  
sure that all Squeakers can profit if we manage to attract more  
business users. I mean, for example Monticello was implemented  
because it was just not reasonable anymore to manage source code with  
change sets in a project with more than two developers.

There are many areas where Squeak could be enhanced to be more  
powerful as a business platform: for example development tools (with  
Shout, eCompletion and others we already made a big step forward),  
core libraries (e.g., the implementation of collections is very bad  
in respect to performance if they are big enough), persistency (e.g.,  
we use OmniBase but run into corruption problems (probably related to  
the VM). If OmniBase was more used under "real" conditions, new users  
would have more security that it works reliably) etc. etc. There are  
certainly many more possibilities and needs...

How can we best push the "professionalization" and attraction of new  
users? I agree with Ron that SqueakFoundation would provide a good  
structure - its goals definitely are about this already. What I think  
is crucial and for now missing are committed people taking action and  
helping to push!

Cheers,
Adrian
>
> What I think is really funny is that most of the smalltalk to Java  
> conversions that I’ve heard about have failed, and secret support  
> of smalltalk is on the rise.  The time is right for something big  
> to happen in the smalltalk community. Croquet could be that big  
> thing, it sure looks interesting.  What ever the big thing is,  
> whether it’s the foundation, or some really cool software,  
> hopefully it will encourage those that believe in smalltalk and the  
> companies that depend on it to say so.
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> Ok so back to lurking,
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> Ron Teitelbaum
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> President / Principal Software Engineer
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> US Medical Record Specialists
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