Can we talk about Info Select?

Posted by Slartibartfarst
Sep 18, 2012 at 09:16 AM

Returning to the topic of InfoSelect: I have noticed a few recent posts in the Yahoo! InfoSelect User Group, and in two of them, 2 separate users say they had actually bought and paid for IS10 (the latest version, with which some users seem to be quite unhappy - per the forum), yet had reverted to IS9 (called “InfoSelect 2007”).

I have been a happy IS user for years, currently using IS8 - which admittedly has some limitations/constraints. I have trialled both IS9/2007 and IS10, but have elected to stay with IS8 as it better suits my requirements.
I find it very interesting that someone would buy IS10 and then return to an earlier version. It looks rather like they may have not evaluated the New Thing terribly rigorously before buying it. In my experience, this can tend to happen if you do not have a clear idea - e.g., including a comprehensive checklist - of the functionality (your requirements) that you need to test for.

When Jim Lewis (President/CEO of Micro Logic, the developer of InfoSelect) was leading and engaging the IS User Group to get their feedback preparatory to making final amendments and releasing a ß version of IS10, I suggested in the discussion threads that a classic approach focussed on user requirements might be useful, and that he could take advantage of the opportunity to ask the tame/collaborative users in the forum (an ideal resource for any developer) to tell him what they thought their requirements were, and then develop to meet those stated/published requirements. Everyone in the forum would have been more likely to buy the new version under such circumstances.
Of course, it never happened, and I really have no idea of the methodology employed in arriving at the end result, except that it seemed to be overly concerned with features rather than the functionality needed to meet defined user requirements (there was little such definition). Again, in my experience, it is characteristic of software that has been developed in a relative vacuum - as opposed to being focussed on user requirements - that resultant user satisfaction will tend to be low. That is what seemed to be the case here - e.g., though I have participated in several user groups over the years, I don’t recall ever having before seen such a collection of disgruntled, critical and generally pissed-off users. Not a few of them seemed to feel that their requirements had been ignored in Cavalier fashion, so some of the users became vociferous and criticism was pretty strong and a separate user group was even formed in protest.

Quite extraordinary really. I don’t understand it. It needn’t have happened. It was avoidable. Things could have been so much better. The IS versions up to IS8 seemed to be seriously good PIM software. IS9/2007 seemed to have but marginal improvements, and IS10 seems to have had a lot of good/useful functionality hacked out of it (regardless of user requirements), and to run in less than ideal fashion - even from an ergonomic (GUI) perspective.
I feel rather sad to see IS end up like this. It was *such* a good product.
Talk about wasted opportunity. Users buying the new version and then reverting to the older one. How much worse could it get? OK, maybe it could be a lot worse, but it still seems to me to be pretty high up the scale as things stand.