On Thu, 27 Jun 1996 13:21:15 GMT "Daniel A. Norton" <[log in to unmask]>
said:
>Nothing other than your message and its tone could have better
>reinforced my opinion about your attitude towards customers.
Thank you. This list gives you direct access to the senior developers who
make design decisions and determine whether your requests are implemented
or not, and when. This has been done for a lot of reasons that I don't
have the time to type and that I am sure everyone can imagine, but the
bottom line is that this is not a formal L-Soft contact channel, this is
not the place to make formal requests for new features with business
justifications, and this is not the place where you will receive the kind
of formal, friendly, business-oriented responses that as a customer you
are entitled to receive from L-Soft. As one of our valuable customers you
are more than welcome to do all these things through the proper method,
which is an e-mail message to [log in to unmask] or a phone call to (301)
731-0440. Requests submitted through this list may or may not receive an
informal response from someone in development who may or may not have the
time to be nice to you or write a calm, polite reply to inflammatory
comments. As a rule, when developers don't have the time to do these
things, they take note of the request, put it on the to do list, but do
not reply. Their job is to improve the product, NOT to reply to angry
customers. If the lack of reply is a problem, I'm sure we can arrange for
a sales person to subscribe and post nice replies as the need arises.
Anyway the current mechanism has worked fine since 1986, but I realize
the Internet is growing and the world is changing. Maybe what we will end
up having to do is start operating like every other company and simply
have a clerical person read the various support lists, compile a monthly
list of requirements from the messages and submit it to the sales team.
This way no customer will be angered at the tone of a reply from
development - everything will be done through the sales unit. To put it
bluntly, the time I spent typing this and the other message is time I
didn't spend implementing the feature you requested or, more importantly,
the other feature we had to push aside in order to make time for yours
and that may no longer be in 1.8c. It simply isn't productive for me to
reply to certain messages and this is why I often refrain from replying.
To take the example of the subject feature, this is a rather delicate
development that will postpone the coding of AFD/FUI, which is sure to
upset a lot of customers who will now write to attempt to sway things the
other way, because due to different environments they couldn't care less
about your feature. The hard business reality however is that some LARGE
customers are now threatening (through proper, formal channels) to switch
to Majordomo because of the subject feature, whereas nobody is even
thinking of switching to Majordomo due to the lack of AFD/FUI, so AFD/FUI
will have to wait. I felt that it was not a good idea to start this
discussion, and this is why I refrained from commenting. Now I will let
you enjoy the flame war and I have used up my public list quota for today
so don't expect any further feedback from me.
Eric
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