I have to say that too much information can hurt a product. Longhorn is a good example imho, as they just annouced a further delay in its release. Now if your a .NET developer (heh l8ly i've been reading lots about .NET) you'd be pretty pissed as it looks like something you would love to get your hands in and muck about in (also then sell).
Yes, that's a very good point. Not only have MS had to announce (multiple) delays with Longhorn but they've also said they are cutting features in order to make the new scheduled launch and repackaging functionality in order to avoid delaying other products. On top of that they're offering varieties of "tech previews" / alpha builds semi-publicly to try to head off much of the criticism. Microsoft have set expectations very, very high for both .NET and for Longhorn so I sympathize with their plight.
It's a fine line for a company to tread. I worked on various product teams in various companies during the 80's and early 90's and product announce policies tended to run along the lines of only ever pre-announcing functionality we had already implemented and QA'd in the lab - we never pre-announced anything we had yet to implement. Even with that you can get into trouble if you implement an 'A' feature and then find that implementing another 'A' feature is impossible without 'un-implementing' the previous 'A' feature. Rare, but it can happen. Yes, it happened once - we cut our losses and pushed the second 'A' feature into the next release where we could afford the time to completely reimplement the first 'A' feature to accommodate the second one. Learned a good lesson in future-proofing software architectures out of that one! :)
I loved product development and would happily move (back) into that area - but the pressures are *very* different in product development to bespoke software development such as web sites.
Sean A Corfield -- http://www.corfield.org/blog/
Macromedia Community Week - May 17-21 http://www.macromedia.com/community/
--- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
MXDU2004 + Macromedia DevCon AsiaPac + Sydney, Australia http://www.mxdu.com/ + 24-25 February, 2004
