wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley) (01/04/91)
> in order for a Totaly Forth Intigrated chip to be acceptible to the Forth > community, (PRICE), it must have features which make it indespensible to > some other market segments as well. The Forth community, as a whole, buys the same kind of machines that everybody else buys. That's why the dominant machine in the Forth marketplace is the PC, even though its processor is about as bad a match to Forth (or to any other reasonable language) as you could ask for. On the other side of the same coin, hardly anybody has Atari ST, even though it is a heck of a good machine for Forth, and costs the same as a PC. It all boils down to marketing, which among other things, encompasses product visibility, availability of hardware and software (even in Podunk), company image, familiarity, advertising, and corporate acceptability. Marketing factors affect the Forth community's buying decisions to about the same degree as they affect everybody else (i.e. it's about 90% of the decision matrix). Mitch