> Allen,
>
> On Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:37:29 -0000, Allen Bauer
> <✉spicedham.codegear.com> wrote:
>
> > Those are all excellent suggestions. I would recommend you contact
> > Michael Rozlog, the RAD Studio Product Manager, and voice your
> > suggestions. He needs to hear from as many of you as possible. If he
> > can come up with a plan and a business case that can clearly show a
> > NET positive gain, his life is much easier.
>
> ... and my life would be so much easier if Michael were to do the
> work for which I am paid. <g>
>
> Don't get me wrong - it would be great to think you were open to
> suggestions - but there's not a lot of evidence for that. In fact
> that most suggestions seem to be dismissed because they come from
> people who "think they know better how to run the company than the
> people who actually run it"
What *would* make you think that we're open to suggestions? Remember,
listening and considering input, is *not* equal to agreeing with or
acting on said input. We *do* want you to feel like your voice is
heard. While we do make product decisions unilaterally (it's not a
democracy), we'd also be foolish to blatantly *ignore* input from
customers or potential customers. That means, and we're painfully
cogniscent of this, that we're *not* going to meet the needs of
everyone.
The absolute *best* form of feedback we can get is more along the lines
of "I'm trying to solve problem X" followed by a description of said
problem. Feedback in the form of "You should implement this new feature
in this way" is, quite frankly, not nearly as useful. It places very
severe restriction on how we can act on it.
If we had a lot of suggestions in the form of problems to be solved, we
can aggregate them together. This allows us to find all the common
points among the problems and create solutions that benefit the widest
range of problems. Unlike most application developers that are focused
on a certain, specific problem or class of problems, we *have* think
about how to create solutions that are beneficial and appealing to the
widest range of customers. If we get too specific, we're excluding too
many people. Even then, there will be *some* classes of problems that
may not be solved with our generalized solutions.
So, when you're giving us feedback, rather thant saying, "I need a
64bit compiler, NOW!" saying, "I need to make sure my MS Office
extension will work with all versions of the new Office 2010" or "My
Explorer shell extension needs to work with all the new 64bit versions
of Windows."
I hope people understand the distinction. The first one doesn't convey
the problem you're trying to solve, nor is it implicitly or explcitly
describing how said solution (or lack thereof) would help (or hinder)
your business. We *love* the latter form of feedback, and have real
trouble categorizing and quantifying the former.
--
Allen Bauer
Embarcadero Chief Scientist
http://blogs.embarcadero.com/abauer