🚀 go-pugleaf

>       How can we plan unless they tell us their intentions.
>
> Once you tell people what to expect from your software development process
> - something that's almost impossible to predict accurately - you'll be
> spending all your time explaining why you're not meeting expectations.

I honestly think this is a matter of how you make your intentions known.
If you express yourself in marketing-mumbo-jumbo-speak that easily could
be interpreted as promises, I can see you would risk such a scenario.
But you could very well announce, without going into details, what your
priorities are for the next release, perhaps just talking about broad
areas such as "XML support" or whatever. Of course you would include a
disclaimer that priorities or resources may change, but it would still
give customers a reasonable chance to make decisions for the future.

The fact is that FM development within Adobe, at least up until now,
has largely been controlled by the wishes of the largest license holders.
Adobe must meet these expectations, or they risk losing the revenue
from such large upgrades. So, in practice, the contents of the next
release is known very well within Adobe, at least in broad terms.
Unless this move to India really will change how the "business case"
for FM is formulated within Adobe. There are more ways than one to
make money out of a product like FM...

> It's bad business to tell the future until you are certain of what's to
come.

Which honestly is a lot sooner than Adobe is announcing today...
I remember when an Adobe reseller could tell me the exact release date
of a new FM release, but couldn't say a word of its contents. If you
have set a release date, then you have finalized development and set
up production, meaning you have a product with ready-made features.
The only thing that could trip you up are production problems or finding
last-minute bugs, but this doesn't affect the contents of the release.
So what stops you from revealing what's in the release? Wouldn't that
actually increase the interest of the upcoming release?


--
/Thomas Michanek, FrameMaker/UNIX/MIF expert
Technical Communicator, Uppsala, Sweden
http://go.to/framers/