There's been an ongoing discussion in comp.lang.smalltalk about PPD and its future. My take on it is that the Java tools market is extremely competitive with many companies selling pretty good development environments for less than $200.00 At these prices, and with what I presume will be higher tech support costs (since Java is immature and PPD does not control the browsers in which the code is supposed to execute), PPD will have to sell an enormous number of copies of Parts for Java in order to break even.
The problem is even worse than that, however. It is rare that the market will support more than two or three development environments for a particular language. Usually, one company gets 60% or more of the market and is followed by another company that gets 20% to 30%. What's left over is not much. PPD must contend with Microsoft, IBM, Borland and Symantec in the Java marketplace, all of whom have much deeper pockets than PPD. I think it is highly unlikely, given the competition, that PPD will end up as one of the top two or three suppliers of Java tools.
Finally, Java itself is overhyped. There is no great virtue in a cross-platform language when almost everyone is running the same platform. Microsoft can insure that everyone runs NT or its successors simply by cutting the price. Hardware is getting so cheap that there's no reason not to deploy highly capable PCs everywhere.
Hardware is cheap, and continues to get cheaper. Programming skill is expensive, and continues to get more so. Environments that trade longer run times for shorter development times are the real growth area. Smalltalk fits this bill better than Java, C++, or Ada.
If your information is correct, PPD is heading in exactly the wrong direction. |
