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From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,can.jobs,ont.jobs
Subject: Re: Software Industry in Canada -- general remarks and questions
Message-ID: <1444@looking.UUCP>
Date: 29 Feb 88 05:25:03 GMT
References: <5358@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <108@bnr-di.UUCP>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 43

And in spite of the difficulties, you might be surprised at what
Canadians have done, although many of them, like entertainers, do it
south of the border.

Consider Cognos, around a $100M company.

And look at the microcomputer industry...

Quantum Software Systems' QNX is one of the major Non-DOS OS's

For a long time Batteries Included was the largest Atari ST publisher,
but it went under for a number of reasons having nothing to do with its
nationality.  Many other Atari and Commodore products come from here, a
few of them mine.

In languages, all the Watcom products, at WATFOR derivatives, plus
most languages for Honeywell mainframes, plus ALICE Pascal. 8-)

The Xim Database

In Spreadsheets, VP-Planner and Vip-Professional, SQZ! and 3-2-1 Blastoff.
Plus the product manager for Lotus 1-2-3 is Canadian.  The integrated
package Ability was written by Canadians here in Waterloo.

In Tools, the Coherent operating system, the MKS toolkit, and the various
less reputable Quaid products like Copywrite.

In the early days of the industry, MicroChess, the most popular program
of its time, was from here.

Lattice's HighStyle Deskstop publisher and Laser Friendly's "Office Publisher".

--- and many more.

The surprising thing is that these products survive in spite of all the
problems here, from border crossing difficulties to trade barriers to
the problems caused by excessive government grants and interference
(Xanaro, Graham Software).

If the border barriers ever do truly drop, what happens may be quite
astounding!
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473