🚀 go-pugleaf

>I think that the major magazines have a lead time of three months or so
>for advertising.  This can cause all kinds of problems if you want your
>ad and your product to appear at the same time.  I suspect that this is
>the leading cause of vaporware from reputable companies.

Speaking of this, have you folks seen the new ads for Doug Clapp's Word
Tools?  They say "Word Tools is finally shipping.  Really."

Talk about an effective mea culpa!

Based on my experience, the most common cause of vaporware is not the
advertising lead time but because the marketing folks don't listen to the
technical folks when building the schedule and set up unrealistic deadlines.
The second most common problem is development folks who underestimate their
software's ability to fight back when being debugged.

A three month lead time to do advertising is no problem, frankly, if the
company involved has their schedules down and their software under control.
Unfortunately, developing a schedule for the writing, debugging and testing
of a piece of software is a difficult thing. The tendency is to build
optimistic schedules, because you want it out sooner rather than later. But
reality doesn't always pay attention.

chuq
Chuq Von Rospach	chuq@sun.COM		Delphi: CHUQ

We live and learn, but not the wiser grow -- John Pomfret (1667-1703)