There are some product areas where lowering the prices will not increase the market such that one can still pay salaries for employees... and still move the pro

There are some product areas where lowering the prices will not increase the market such that one can still pay salaries for employees... and still move the product forward through platform changes. Commercial Common Lisp seems to be such an area. There were cheaper alternatives in the past. Let's compare a cheaper one with LispWorks: Around 1986 began the story of MCL: Macintosh Common Lisp was a commercial product originally developed for the 68k Mac by a small company. At some point in time Apple bought it, but mostly to maintain it and use the technology&people to develop a different language (Dylan). When Apple lost interest, there was still enough of a user base to not let it die, but to have a small company selling the product - ported to the PowerPC - the new CPU for the Mac. So the company sold MCL for PowerPC to their customers. Then Apple switched to MacOS X. MCL was moved to MacOS X on PowerPC - using a compatibility library provided by Apple (Carbon). But MCL was not ported to Cocoa. Then Apple introduced the Intel based Mac. MCL ran with the compatibility layer on the PowerPC emulator - not that great. Then Apple gave up the PowerPC and gave up the emulator and gave up Carbon -> MCL was dead. What we have now is a free version of MCL called Clozure CL - which hasn't catched up with MCL's IDE... which is really sad, since it was liked by its users. Same time - around 1986 - LispWorks was developed by Harlequin. Initially for the UNIX market: enterprise + universities. With IDE. After several years it was ported to Windows and the IDE technology was made independent from X11 (Motif + Windows). Several CPUs were supported - not just Intel. Harlequin (a company with many offerings) went out of business - the remains were bought and the Lisp business was transferred to a new company. Then LispWorks got ported to the new Mac OS X. With native support for Cocoa. Later the UNIX version moved away from Motif to GTK+. Recently the runtime was ported to Android and iOS. There is a constant stream of porting it to the current platforms - for example it has currently supported implementations for ARM, X64, POWER and SPARC - each in 32bit and 64bit variants. Now we have the fate of two commercial products serving the small niche of Common Lisp developers: a) the more affordable one, formerly available only for one platform. Now dead. b) the expensive one, available for several currently popular operating systems. The big question nobody has been able to answer successfully: is there a place for a Common Lisp (or similar) IDE getting more popular so that a lower price point is viable - the product has a longterm future, has full-time employees maintaining it and is not bound to a single platform and its fate? If there were a positive answer to it, then either some of the formerly existing products in that price range would have survived (Golden Common Lisp, ExperCommon Lisp, Procyon Common Lisp, Corman Common Lisp, Macintosh Common Lisp, ...) or we would have seen successful new attempts after 2000 competing with an IDE-based product against the expensive Allegro CL and LispWorks offerings. Sublime Text is $80. Can we see a CL implementation for a smaller market (yes, there are more users for a general text editor than Lisp developers) which costs $80 AND which pays the rent for its developer(s)? Corman Lisp did cost $200 and did not survive... Btw., this topic has been discussed a lot in the CL community. For years...