Re: Ada GC

hbaker@netcom.com (Henry Baker) writes:


> A company that offers what people ask for will do ok. A company
> that offers what people didn't realize they needed will do
> fantastically. I'd be surprised if Sun's customers were blowing
> down their doors with requests for a garbage-collected scripting
> language that masqueraded as C++, at least until Sun showed them
> what it was good for...
>The second approach is called 'market leadership'.


Perhaps one in thousands will do "fantastically". Even then, the
process of technological innovation has only just started. What
follows in the process has been characterized by some investigators
(Dorothy Leonard-Barton of the Harvard Business School, for example)
as "mutual adaptation", where users adapt themselves to the
innovation, and the innovation is adapted to its users. So even what
begins with some visionary leap rapidly becomes an extended sequence
of market-driven steps. Survival is, ultimately, a matter of
evolution.


--
Larry Howard
Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
lph@sei.cmu.edu, (412) 268-6397
--

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