Re: How did C++ beat the competition?

From: Randy Gordon (randyjg2_at_yahoo.nospam)
Date: 03/13/04 

Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2004 11:39:20 GMT

Glad to elaborate.

When the recession hit, I was heavily into Java and J2EE, but frankly,
most commercial implementations were very poor at the time. I was very
familiar with Windows programming, but I didn't really see a future for
it in a world dominated by the Internet. On the other hand, something
like 43% of the programmers in the financial industry were also being
laid off (including everyone I knew). I had C++ opportunities, but what
I really wanted to do was start a company.

I had done technical due diligence as a sideline when I was at Merrill,
so I did the obvious, a channel check. Talked to vendors, marketers,
end users, everybody. As late as summer of last year, the prognosis by
just about everybody was the same...there was no future in commercial
C++ and they expected to shift to Java, merge or go out of business
soon. Sales to enterprises were dominated by a few key vendors that had
long standing relationships with the upper management, and those vendors
were telling them to stay with Java, that there was a full suite of
programs in the offing.

There was a minor reversal a year or so ago when J2EE projects produced
programs that were too slow or inefficient for production. But the newer
J2EE products, and a better understanding of J2EE performance management
has pretty much eliminated that problem.

I did investigate why this was happening. The real issue is what
economists call "technical factors of production" (TFP) Read what OECD
or Brookings (mainstream think tanks) have to say on the subject. The
short version is that, given the huge pool of Java and VB programmers in
the developing economies, economics pretty much mandates that whatever
can be done in those languages, will be.

And what you can do is expanding. Look at what happened with VB. It used
to be you wrote in VC++ because you couldn't create dll's in VB. Now you
can, and that part of the market has shrunk for VC++. Advances in Java
technology are going to reduce the need for C++ the same way.

On the other hand, look at what happened with Basic. It was a dead
language until MS revived it with Visual Basic, which at the time, was
essentially a great IDE over what was mostly original Basic with a great
set of custom libraries.

The revitalization of Basic was due to Microsoft carefully examining the
TFP's of the industry. They could just as easily done it with C++, but
Gates had a long standing relationship with Basic from the early days.

If you carefully examine the TFP's today, there are opportunities, both
in C++ as a language, and in commercial C++.products.

Exploiting them, however, is another matter. If you listened to
Greenspans speech to Congress a few weeks ago, he touched on what was
needed...except for one point. That point was someone to make it happen.

For various technical reasons, the C++ community is by far the best
place (as far as the US is concerned) to make it happen. The problem is,
there is no leaders, just academicians interested in theory, small
business owners, and low level production line managers.

Greg Comeau wrote:
>
>>The fact that most C++ vendors are going belly up.
>
>
> Please elaborate.

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