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From: vrotney@netcom.com (William Paul Vrotney)
Subject: Re: Why lisp failed in the marketplace
In-Reply-To: barmar@tools.bbnplanet.com's message of 13 Feb 1997 18:51:52 -0500
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Date: Fri, 14 Feb 1997 00:18:02 GMT
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In article <5e09eo$joq@tools.bbnplanet.com> barmar@tools.bbnplanet.com (Barry Margolin) writes:
> 
> It might, but it would run into the same marketplace issues that the
> original Ivory did.  Basically, it's virtually impossible for a small
> company to succeed with proprietary hardware, since they can't get the
> economies of scale that the big guys could.  This is also why Thinking
> Machines (my former employer) eventually had to give up on being a hardware
> vendor: they simply couldn't compete in price wars with Intel and IBM MPP
> systems; so they switched to developing software that could be ported to
> other MPP's or networks of workstations.

True, but this principle has nothing to do with proprietary or Lisp based
hardware.  Motorola might have the same problem if Macs start using Intel as
well.



-- 

William P. Vrotney - vrotney@netcom.com
