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Inferno marketing vs. Java marketing -Reply



>>> Anssi Porttikivi <porttikivi@dlc.fi> 01/27/97 05:50pm >>>
>[...]
>I am personally convinced that Inferno + Tk etc... + Limbo are much better
>technology than JavaVM + Sun class libraries + language.
>[...]
>
>I think there are two ways to prove this to the world: you can either get
>>the message through by marketing and open communications, explaining it to
>everybody. But a better way is to release a few practical, ground breaking
>mass market applications and give them away for free. After all, people
>take an actual working program as an argument over hype anyday.

There are numerous excellent points brought up in the original post here.
Unfortunately, there seems to be some concept that Java, et. al. and Inferno
are competing in the same market space. I don't believe that they are. Java
is competing for mindshare on the basis of marketing. Inferno is competing
for actual developers on the basis of technology. If history is any kind of
predictor, in an open market marketing will triumph over technology.

Kaleida's ScriptX was vastly superior to Java in the area of multimedia
development, but it was a pure technology and Kaleida treated itself as
as research organization. I feel, in a lot of ways, that Lucent is treating
Inferno as something somewhere between an R&D effort and a product.
Kaleida's biggest mistake was that neither they, nor any third party until
way too late, created an authoring environment/RAD tool. I realize that
resource are limited but I also realize that Microsoft has succeeded by
doing the marketing/mindshare stuff first, then developing the technology
to do something like what they said it would do.

A roadmap, examples of why Inferno is better than anything else, reasons
why using Inferno is a lower risk proposition than (fill in the blank),
and some visually satisfying apps will do a lot more to win converts and
mindshare than any technology ever will.

//hjp

Howard J. Postley
Cloud 9 Interactive

P.S. I still want the best technology...