Re: Lisp considered unfinished / marketing strategy

[kr@shell.portal.com (kr)]

At 19:40 6/4/95, Ken Anderson wrote:
>   These issues have been untreated emergencies for some years now.
>
>It is easy to say "we did that 10 years ago in Lisp".  However, it doesn't
>mean much if we can't deliver it to the people who want it now.  We need to
>collect and focus our capabilities so we can.

I suspect that this is largely due to a marketing issue. As LISP was
(correctly) perceived as a sophisticated environment, it was traditionally
sold at price points designed to appeal to customers with tasks so complex,
that they knew they could not do with anything less than LISP. So this
language has always been confined to a fairly elitist circle of users (many
even lavishly funded by the DoD :-).

This policy risks being run over at some point by (lower quality) mass
market products, just by virtue of sheer volume (see Microsoft, etc.)

The only way to counter this, is by changing the strategy and to start
mass-marketing Common LISP too. This may feel unappealing at first, but
will likely win out in the long run. The only way to push a language is to
make sure that it will have a huge user base. If Common LISPs were sold at
$100 (instead of several times more), so that many people would buy it
without even thinking much about it (and then getting addicted only later
on), the potential market could easily be ten times larger than today,
which still would lead to a higher total profit despite the lower price
point.

But the more important, indirect effect will the larger user base, which is
an advantage that grows over time.


Greetings
Markus Krummenacker