From: Ed L Cashin
Subject: Re: Is there a LISP operating system?
Date: 
Message-ID: <874re3jouv.fsf@cs.uga.edu>
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:

...
> An attempt was made to cater to high end
> users and not low end users, which meant the available market was very
> small.
> 
> The question above contains a misconception.  Being powerful is
> probably as much responsible for its demise as anything.  I have a
> personal rule of thumb (that still needs a pithy title) that says that
> when a high end market leader goes head to head with a low end market,
> the low end market leader will generally win out...  Certainly that's
> what happened here, anyway.

"Popularization"?  

> There's an easy assumption that power, elegance, etc. are things
> that are market survival characteristics.  I see little evidence
> that this is so.

It seems like in general, when innovations first occur, two types of
people can profit from the innovations: the innovators, who often
understand elegance and high-level functionality; and hype-mongers.

After the innovations have been around for a while, the popularizers
take over, the innovators recede, and the hype-mongers continue.
(Sometimes these roles may be performed by the same entity, like with
Java, but I wonder whether that's possible without at least one of the
faces being lessened -- innovation, marketing, or accessibility.)

-- 
--Ed L Cashin            |   PGP public key:
  ·······@uga.edu        |   http://noserose.net/e/pgp/
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Is there a LISP operating system?
Date: 
Message-ID: <sfwadnu8uvg.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com>
Ed L Cashin <·······@uga.edu> writes:

...
> It seems like in general, when innovations first occur, two types of
> people can profit from the innovations: the innovators, who often
> understand elegance and high-level functionality; and hype-mongers.
> 
> After the innovations have been around for a while, the popularizers
> take over, the innovators recede, and the hype-mongers continue.
> (Sometimes these roles may be performed by the same entity, like with
> Java, but I wonder whether that's possible without at least one of the
> faces being lessened -- innovation, marketing, or accessibility.)

I don't think this is the right analysis for several reasons.

First, I think the term hype-monger is a non-scientific term that
neglects important market actions.  Hype is important in building
interest, but the analysis here does not distinguish between
"contentful hype" and "vacuous hype".

Second, I think the issue of who can profit as presented here is
one-sided.  People who are "buying" the product are also "profiting"
in a different way, and leaving the customer out of the equation
doesn't show the full view of what is really going on in market
dynamics.

The book "Crossing the Chasm" analyzes this issue in the cleanest way,
I think, essentially pointing out that the sale of a product to 
"early adopters" requires different product presentation, different 
marketing, etc., than does sale of product to more conservative buyers.
The real truth is that if a company thinks that selling more is a matter
of simply "ramping up" and "selling more in the same way as they have",
they will never bridge the gap between "new technology" sales and
"established technology" sales.

The Lisp Machine appealed to early adopters--leading edge folks who placed
a premium value on the latest and greatest, who tolerated breakages between
releases, who were willing to work with documentation that required a deep
understanding or careful reading, etc.  The Lisp Machine did not appeal to
conservative buyers, who wanted push button solutions, who wanted total
code stability, who wanted glossy documentation that didn't require them
to be sophisticated programmers (or didn't make them think they were required
to be), etc.

Third, I think the problem isn't so much innovators receding as innovators
failing to recede. The process of tuning for marketing is very different
than the process of innovating, and it's the are innovator that can do both
roles.  By analogy, I've heard it said that people who are good presidents
of startup companies are rarely good presidents of established companies
and vice versa, so often the originators hang on too long and their intuitions
start to lead down bad paths.

Java is perhaps interesting because its somewhat lack of economic
motivation for "breaking even" (never having really been sold as
product per se, and apparently offered as a loss leader / advertising
gimick / killer app for other products that it is pushing) probably
insulates it from the normal effect of having to behave in certain
ways that businesses driven by market forces have to behave.  Thus it
can keep "innovating" and the original people can stay involved ... on
the other hand, they have at least been smart enough to see that no
matter how much it would be fun to keep on tweaking the language,
absolute code stability is important, and this is what appeals to some
conservative customers.