> I already use MT-Newswatcher, and it is very complete. I wouldn't need
> MacSoup. I would have liked to switch my newsreading to Entourage so that I
> use only one app for PIM, e-mail and newsreading, but that's not likely to
> happen.
I understand the desire.
> I was told that it simply doesn't support threaded views with dates when I
> asked someone from the Entourage list. I would like to think that it is not
> necessarily difficult to implement such small functions, but hey, I'm not the
> MS guy in charge of such decisions.
There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny little features that
would are relatively simple to implement.
The difficulty typically isn't in actually implementing them. The
difficulty is in choosing those changes that most leverage your resources.
If you're managing a product, you've got a near infinite number of feature
requests, hundreds to thousands of bug reports, your own design agenda, your
management's gripe list, and pet bugs and features of your developers.
Out of this list, you'll typically attempt to address all the high priority
bugs. That one is a no-brainer (although defining "high priority" is always
an interesting dance).
You'll give in to a minimal subset of your developer's pet changes (because
if they lose interest, you lose staff...and without staff, there's no
product).
But these two categories have just consumed 50% of your available resources.
So, given the time available, you have to start picking and choosing on the
basis of what can be done by the oftentimes arbitrary date you've been
handed.
What changes *can be done* and will most expand your customer base or will
most impact your current customer base? That's the primary question.
As a programmer and a software designer and a software user, I want
Entourage to be a messaging interface. Because to me, email and news and
schedule reminders and task reminders are just messages. But, having
written Internet software that was targeted at a similar market, I am fully
aware that less than 10% of my paying users are actually using news.
I'm also aware that those 10% of my customer base are often using other
software that is way, way better at news than I can hope to be without
substantial reworking of my news client. And I've only got enough time to
tweak things for this next release...
Of course, this means that new support becomes a Catch-22. The lack of
effort is reflected in the software, the lack of support is clear to the
clients, so you tend to do just enough to get by... News support enters a
nebulous region where you never quite fix it but you never quite remove it.
This is never enough to make the news client world class; there are *free*
world class news client. And, what's the point of writing a world class
news browser when there's no revenue attached to doing so? [Ironic that
Microsoft and what little remains of Netscape (I *hate* Netscape) are
partially sowing that which they reaped when they devastated the commercial
TCP/IP marketplace by giving away Mail and Web software.]
Anyway, my point is that news doesn't provide any marginal revenue. In
fact, we used to have to do custom builds for many of our Fortune 500
clients in which news was completely disabled. No marginal revenue, very
little additional support.
mikel
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