Re: Language Marketing (was: What design is: 911 vs. Fleetwood)

[Paul Graham <address@hidden>]

Design is a proper subset of business strategy.  If you
consider them identical you use the word differently from
the rest of us.  The proof is that (as we use the word)
you can have a wonderfully designed product that fails
in the market because, say, your competitor intimidated
the channel into excluding you.  If you stretch the 
definition of design all the way from (what the rest of
us call) design to the kind of bribery and intimidation
that gets stuff on the shelves at Wal-Mart, you've lost
a useful concept.

We're designing Arc roughly for the language equivalent
of the 1970 Porsche 911 market.  People who want to 
solve hard problems with few tokens, and who are not
going to be intimidated by what a language has to look
like to do that.

--- "S. Alexander Jacobson" <alex@shop.com> wrote:

> Design IS business strategy.  Designing and delivering a product good
for
> a particular market(1) and getting word out to that market makes
people
> happy, and, if that product has network externalities(2), getting
word
> out to that market IS what makes people happy.
> 
> Office applications have powerful network externalities, so, in some
> sense, MSFT marketing rather than its products are indeed what makes
> people happy.  That is why you get people saying things like:
> "No one ever got fired for choosing MSFT/IBM/____."
...
> So the question is, for whom are you designing Arc?  As for me, I
> plan to
> design a language for people interested in lightweight languages :-).


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