From: dpayton@qcinet.Gwinnett.COM (Doug Payton)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: HP and windows NT
Date: 5 Oct 92 13:41:07 GMT
Organization: Quality Consultants, Inc.

In article <1992Oct01.133118.10118@cadlab.sublink.org> martelli@cadlab.sublink.org (Alex Martelli) writes:
>dpayton@qcinet.Gwinnett.COM (Doug Payton) writes:
>	...
>:You say, correctly, that businesses pick their appliations and then buy
>:the machine it runs on.  But I'm not sure that developers make the
>:decision that way, as you put forth.  If the customer will pick an OS
>:based on it's application base, and since customers buy the work of
>:developers, then developers need to look at the -customer application
>:base- of an OS, rather than the developer application base.  That is, if
>:more people will buy machine X because of it's application base, then
>:perhaps I should write for that machine, since so many people will have
>:it.  Witness the IBM PC.  
>
>The obvious counter to this is that, if there are already THAT many
>applications on platform X, then there is sure to be excellent competitors
>to the application you plan to provide.  For example, word processors and
>spreadsheets on PC's are a dime a dozen; could you compete there?

The "customer application" argument is, certainly, only one of many
items to consider when picking an OS to write for.  Vast Competition can
be a show-stopper, to be sure, but Borland, for example, has been able
to overcome that.  Granted, not many small companies could duplicate
that feat.  

I was just countering the idea that developers should only write for an
OS that they like the tools for.

>The case in which a developer chooses a platform depending on the tools
>available for it, is, instead, typically when an innovative thing is
>planned, one that may well be later be ported elsewhere, but for being
>born at all requires the very best development environment.  

I can see your point for the most part, but I can forsee possible
problems when porting to platforms without the tools the developers have
been relying on.  Perhaps most of them may not be needed in the porting,
true.  There are certainly a myriad of special cases and situations that
call for looking at tools.  My initial reply was to the rather general
statement that developers don't need to look at the customer application
base, and to the additional general statement that they only need to
look at the tools that run on an OS.  Both, I believe, are not true in a
generalized form.  More often, a developer should look at other things
first.

>A similar
>case, minus the porting, is when you have the target of an in-house
>application, one that will not need to be marketed; in this latter case,
>of course, if the thing must later run on many sites, you will also have
>to consider the cost of application deployment as well as that of
>application developent -- but often the former can be heavily discounted
>with respect to the latter, since the boxes for deployment will be bought
>much later than the development costs are borne; also, development has the
>horrendous indirect cost of not yet being able to deploy the thing until
>it's done, which for critical in-house applications means that you are
>bearing other costs (which the in-house app will do away with when it
>work) all through the time it takes you to develop it -- considerations on
>the costs of boxes for deployment often pale besides that, so that if a
>platform with better tools allows even just, say, to spend 15 rather than
>18 months for the development phase...

All this is true in that specific set of circumstances, but there are
also many situations where the choice of computer, especially in larger
corporations where policy on such things are made, has already been made
for you.  
-- 
Doug Payton -- Internet:  dpayton@qcinet.gwinnett.com

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
"It is true that to err is human--
but it can be overdone."                                            Unknown
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp