>Oh, come on Eric, how can you make a statement like that? Maybe people
>can't find what they need in the manual
People keep complaining about that, and I am not working on the assumption
that they are lying to us for some hidden purpose, I am assuming that they do
indeed find the manual daunting. It is a frequent complaint and the people
who have helped us proofread the first of the new manuals have been very
positive. Maybe *you* do not have a problem with the manual, but this is not
something I made up.
>So does that mean everything you put into Listserv has to meet your
>threshold of what's appropriate or else it's considered -- your word --
>"stupid?"
Every company with significantly more than 2-3 employees needs to make
at least semi-formal decisions about what to include and what not to include
in the product. There are a lot of reasons why a particular feature may not
be included, the most common is prioritizing but there are other issues. Some
features violate RFCs or can cause problems for OTHER customers without
negatively impacting the one requesting the feature.
Anyway, the bottom line is that not every feature can be implemented, and
someone has got to make that decision. Frankly I don't see why you find it
shocking that personally I only add features when I think they meet a certain
threshold of usefulness, customer appeal, whatever you want to call it. If the
implementation time is significant, by providing the feature I am failing to
provide another feature which was formally planned (and may have been
promised to another customer, usually several other customers in fact).
In most companies, the policy is that you have a "to do" list and a wish list,
that items on the "to do" list do not get displaced without a really good
reason, and that there is some kind of procedure for wish list items to make
it to the "to do" list, by default at the bottom. A customer who lost the source
code to a key custom application is not ordinarily considered sufficient cause to
disrupt the "to do" list, and makes it to the wish list instead. Like most issues
that affect only one customer, it tends to get a low priority because the maximum
kickback is one sale. Sometimes it does get done, for instance LISTSERV
has code to avoid folding a line of text between "XYZ" and "Inc.", which was not
a trivial change and led to other features not making it into the product in the
same time frame. It was a sound business decision based on the size of the
prospect. But usually these features never make it to the "to do" list because
all the other features with comparable implementation time have a much higher
expected kickback than a single sale. Technical people often call these features
"stupid" because they are really one site's problem, and technically they ought
to be solved differently, not by expecting off-the-shelf products to have knowledge
of highly specific local problems.
>I am sure the others who have discussed on
>LSTOWN-L their wish for such a feature will chip in a few bucks, too, for a
>quarter hour of your brainpower. :)
This will not help, what you need to do is make tomorrow last 24h and 15
minutes :-) Take Microsoft for instance, don't you think Gates would gladly
write a $100M check for NT 5.0 to be ready today, if only he could???
>In all, I am somewhat dismayed by what appears from your post to be
>L-soft's complacent perspective on the development and feature addition
>issue.
All right John, I'll implement your feature if you can find me another comparable
software company (NOT a basement company) which, unlike L-Soft, implements
any and all changes on the assumption that if customers require them, they just
have to be implemented ASAP :-)
Eric
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