The marketing of Forth workshop report

This is a summary of the Marketing of Forth Workshop held at the SIGForth 90 conference. We started by listing the marketing concerns of Forth vendors. However, we quickly discovered that the real issue was the Marketing of Forth to the general public. We fhtished the workshop listing some of the ways that the Forth enthusiast could improve Forth’s chances of being accepted as a language of choice. The Marketing of Forth workshop was held at the SIGForth 90 conference. It was an impromptu gathering lasting approximately one hour. Participating were: Dave Ruske, Greg Lisle, Wayne Wekner, Paul Snow, Richard Manning, Phil Koopman, Frank Earl, Lenord Mogan, Tom Hand, Howard Harkness, Kurt Barber, Larry Forsley, Warren Bean. First we had to figure out just what it means to market Forth. Here are two definitions that summarize our thoughts: 1) The Merchandising of Forth development environments and programming tools or applications that utilize Forth. 2) The establishment of Forth as a language of choice among a particular group of users or within a particular programming domain. Permission to copy without fee all or psrt of thie material ia granted, provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice ie given that wpying ie by permission of the Association for Computkg Machinery. TO copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or spec~lc permieaion. 01991 ACM 0-89791-462-7/90/0200-0063 $1.50 Each of the above definitions deals with the marketing of Forth from a different viewpoint. The fiist applies specificrdly to the Forth vendor or the application developer who uses Forth by choice. Whereas, the second, applies to any Forth enthusiast attempting to propagate the acceptance of Forth. The Forth vendor is concerned with the selling his product. Obviously, if increasing the use of Forth increases his potential customer base, he will attempt to generate interest in Forth. However, he is mainly interested selling to the existing market. Thus his products reflect the needs and desires of the Forth programmer. During the workshop we derived the following list of marketing concerns that may be of interest to the forth vendor: 1) At what level should he enter the market place? 2) How extensive should his product line be? 3) Should he focus his marketirtg effort in a specific application area? 4) How should he reach his potential customers? 5) now can he establish insight into his customer’s needs? 6) At what level should he provide support and by what means? 7) How should the product be packaged? 8) What about manuals?