If you guys were in action, you'd have a beta.
Silence isn't exactly the way you develop a platform and engage developers. Silence isn't exactly the way you interact with customers and collect their pain points and desires to create a feature list for the next release. In the end, silence is a good way to create false expectations and alienate your developers and customers who care enough to follow this blog. People who follow this blog are not exactly your casual users. We are your power users. We are your core developers. We are your fans.
I'd like to point out that the community hasn't been confusing silence with inaction, but has been (correctly) equating silence with *uncertainty*.
You have zero credibility with developers. You need to be upfront, honest, and open.
So who is being raked over the coals? It's actually Microsoft and this is taking place on their own IE blog. The post from last week had a similarly icy reception. What has web developers so riled up? Well apparently there was a meeting in Redmond this week to discuss IE8. The only information coming out of that was that the next version of IE is going to be 8. No information about features, plans, or anything else, even to people who are design partners. It has been a year since IE7 was released and the IE product manager has been virtually silent about any future plans. Bill Gates committed to a 9 to 12 month release of IE updates, so some people are pretty pissed. Read more about it at Computerworld and Molly Holzschlag's blog.
See, MS developers do call MS to task sometimes. :-)
Watching the neighbor's house go up in flames?
ReplyDeleteWow, I guess the IE8 team is finding that having a blog can be a double-edged sword! Excellent read, thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteWeb developers aren't MS developers as you call it.
ReplyDeleteMS has the biggest market share of the browsers, so all of us (including "Lotus" developers) that work on the web has to make sure the pages work in technology that is 6 years old.
Apart from that, I agree that there are some similarities (even more before it was announced that DDE was coming in Notes 8.5).
Since the beginning of this century, little has happened technology-wise both in Domino Designer and with IE.
Tommy, I understand and appreciate that IE's lack of standards compliance affects pretty much everyone. My point is that a lot of the people posting on the IE blog are MS developers in that they do ASP.Net coding. Molly is an independent consultant, but she is also on a team similar to the Lotus Design Partner group. I still stand by this being mostly MS-focused developers who are taking MS to task for being ignored. As you said, it's eerily similar to the recent conversations happening in our own little corner of the blogosphere.
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