Hi all,
It seems that Marjorie's original comments have touched off another list
firestorm. I have used the major GIS products and have always settled down
with MI. AV has some basic problems of their own and they don't seem to
listen to their users at all. Witness the forwards by Neil from the AV list
and the high levels of frustration experienced by the user base.
I have to disagree with the comments made below about MI taking a page from
Microsoft's play book. I believe that you have to have the really deep
pockets of MS, not necessarily for the development of the new tools, but
for the lawsuits that follow from the little company that MS pirated
software from. Back a few years ago, MS couldn't develop defrag utility
that worked correctly in the DOS environment. What did they do, they stole
outright, the software that Symantec (Norton's) had been using quite well
for some time. After a suit from Symantec, then MS licensed the technology.
There also were other suits, probably more than were reported by the press
at the time.
I do agree that MI should listen better to their users, but they don't have
those bottomless pockets yet to develop features at will. Perhaps they
should develop tighter marketing partnerships with third party developers
and bundle the additional features/data together as one product under one
price point. That, unfortunately, would cause many of us to join up in arms
against Troy for raising prices and bundling features that aren't used by
the majority of the multitude.
Where does that leave us? Perhaps the point releases (4.1, 4.5, 5.5 etc.)
should be fine tuners rather than enhancements. Generally, with 6 months or
more between major and point releases, there is enough user input from
forums such as this that would work out the kinks of the major release. So,
Troy, split the developers with three teams: 1 to handle the enhancements,
or new technology of a major release, 1 to handle the user tweaks of a
point release and 1 that is smaller and handles the pie-in-the-sky requests
or plans the development of versions that are still two or so years from
hitting the shelf.
$0.025 worth of comments
>_______________________________________________________________
At 02:35 PM 4/8/99 +1000, you wrote:
>Hi all:
>
>The comments about add-ons reveal an interesting contrast between the way
>MapInfo do things and the way Microsoft have done them in the past.
>
>MapInfo seem to take the approach that if there is a third party supplier of
>a tool, then there is no need to be involved. Microsoft has very
>successfully(!!) taken the approach of incorporating third party ideas
>(either by licensing or by reproducing them) and including them with the
>basic product. After all, if someone a tool is successful, customers
>presumably want it.
>
>This approach seems to have worked rather well for Microsoft and in many
>cases probably does not require a huge investment. Maybe MapInfo should take
>a leaf out of Microsoft's book (although maybe they need to be careful about
>which ones!!).
>
>Mark Knudsen
>_______________________________________________________________
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