>> In fact, having a reviewer note that you have a "world class Usenet client"
>> can cost you a sales agreement.
>
> Explain further.
Based upon events that happened to a now defunct software company that wrote
Internet software.
We had multiple companies threaten at the last minute to back out of
six-to-seven digit contracts when "management" read a review that extolled
the virtues of the news client.
Since "everyone knows" that Usenet is a bunch of worthless fluff and is
mostly just used for porn *and* management was greatly concerned about
deploying tools that would allow their employees greater ease in goofing
off, they decided to cancel the contract and change to a product without a
news client.
We were able to salvage the deals by deploying a version of the software
with the news client disabled.
I imagine that attitudes in many of the Fortune 500 sized companies haven't
changed all that much.
>> But even Microsoft doesn't have enough spare money and, more importantly,
>> spare people to integrate a "world class Usenet client" into the fold. Thus
>> the status quo and the continual flack (but less flack than the other
>> option) for having a, by comparison to their mail client, sub-par news
>> client.
>
> With all the power that Entourage has, it would just take little things -
> such as smarter threading - to make it worthy in newsreading. In fact, I
> will switch my newsreading to Entourage if such threading is implemented. It
> has everything I want for newsreading, except threading by date.
My check list for a truly good news reader is apparently much longer than
yours. ;-)
Sadly Dan says that your feature is hard to do with their infrastructure.
I'd call that a design flaw. But then I haven't thought at length about why
it's hard for them.
And I'd rather have a generalized means of doing secondary and tertiary
sorting throughout the application.
>> And, realistically speaking, Entourage is a business application.
>
> Oh really ?
>
> <http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2638968,00.html>
Some people. I missed that.
But somehow I doubt that Excel and PowerPoint are truly "consumer" products.
Perhaps they just didn't want to say "SOHO" (Small Office/Home Office)?
Which was last years "hot" market sector...
Do we really think that consumers who are buying circa $1k computers for
home are the same group that are buying a circa $1/2k software product?
>> And I think that you'll find that the Entourage newsreader is more than
>> sufficient for 75+% of the (at most) 10% (and probably closer to 5%) of the
>> user base that actually uses the news client. Meaning that at worse only
>> 2.5% of the users "have to" resort to also using a standalone news client.
>
> Which means that it would take a limited number of additions to make it good
> enough for those who don't use it for newsreading.
But do you focus your limited development resources on a non-revenue
producing change that only matters to 2.5% of your users?
Or do you add another checkbox feature that allegedly increases your
potential customer base by 2.5%, 5%, or even 10%?
I haven't looked recently, but I don't think that there is, at the moment, a
single "real company" producing news client software. But then...there
aren't too terribly many "real companies" producing mail client software.
Of course, in the end, this is all an exercise in meaninglessness. The only
opinions about this stuff that really matter are those of the people at
Microsoft making decisions. And they're unlikely to comment on the feature
set of unreleased products. ;-)
mikel
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