A reality check please!

Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Mar 6, 2007 at 09:16 PM

Jack Crawford wrote:

>
>At the risk of sounding egotistic, testing and
>using software is about the ability of the vendor to meet MY needs as the customer, not
>the other way round. We all want to be loyal, but in this game you have to think of
>yourself first. Otherwise you end up feeling betrayed and ripped off. I think we all
>have better things to do than cry over spilt milk.

Jack,

ADM is not a symbol for the inevitable disappointments in software development. I’m sure there is enough of that, enough that one wants to hope that the inevitable is not compounded by the fraudulent. Jan, for example, is now absolutely correct that the suppression of discussion and criticism is a sure sign of problems far worse than bad luck or a bad temper. Any software forum hosted by a developer who censors posts for contents is disrespectful of its customers
to give an unrelated example. The smart and honest developer welcomes discussion of competing products, for example, because he thinks his product will benefit from the comparison and because he wants to know about what others are doing. He can recognize services users are actually providing gratis, and take the benefit, instead of interposing his ego and taking offense. Or, lacking confidence in his own product, striving to shield his customers from persuasion by users of competing products.Unfortunately, where a developer is psychopathic, self-selected users become the developer’s hit men in such forums. Their fanatacism about the product is NOT the result of self-sacrifice to the developer. They have some kind of ego stake in the product—its functioning has come to represent their own.

Anyway, we agree about OneNote.