Well, “quite confident” is not a commitment. I personally like very much having some degree of expectation, like to hear a “maybe february” and having it later, like june (a 4 months deviation) and have some reports in the middle like “we are 97% ready, but the last 3% seems hard and will take few more months, maybe 3 to 5, stay tuned”, than a we don’t tell anything until we have it done.
I agree, but I don’t think the person up above was asking for a commitment either, just an update.
I know it is a fine line to walk to keep customers interested in upcoming things and yet keep expectations realistic. What I am saying is making snarky comments back at the users (even when they are making some themselves), is less than useful. Like many of us, we have customers too, and the better position is try to take these conversations down a more positive road.
[quote=32676:@Dennis Wilkerson]On the flip side, you shouldn’t be surprised when users get their expectations up when you post teasers like this (From the Real Studio) blog:
“However, we are quite confident that 2012 Release 1, scheduled to ship in February, will bring our Cocoa support to the point where we can remove the beta label.”
That was posted on October 5, 2011. This is software, things happen, we all know this. But every time someone brings up a date, someone from Xojo talks them down. I think you guys should be a little more upbeat about users looking forward to your products, instead of a thorn in your side.[/quote]
While I’m not the one implementing iOS and can’t comment on time frames, I can say that it lacks all of the baggage and legacy compatibility constraints that made the Cocoa framework so miserable (and hard to predict).
[quote=32687:@Rick A.]Well, “quite confident” is not a commitment. I personally like very much having some degree of expectation, like to hear a “maybe february” and having it later, like june (a 4 months deviation) and have some reports in the middle like “we are 97% ready, but the last 3% seems hard and will take few more months, maybe 3 to 5, stay tuned”, than a we don’t tell anything until we have it done.
[/quote]
If you ever see that from any technology, specifically software, company, they’re lying to you. The reason you don’t do that with developer tools is that there are hundreds of developers who are just your finished release away from moving out of Mom’s basement and literally changing the world.
You guys are taking this other places that it was not intended. Norman brought up an old post from the old forum as an example, I was just pointing out the same. When we are accepting or setting expectations, things can an end up far away from the original estimates.
Fair enough. I just saw Cocoa and replied about why those predictions were so wildly off.
[quote=32676:@Dennis Wilkerson]
But every time someone brings up a date, someone from Xojo talks them down. I think you guys should be a little more upbeat about users looking forward to your products, instead of a thorn in your side.[/quote]
We do like to say “this is coming and we expect about here” but getting repeatedly beaten up about being off on our estimate results in a lot of stress for everyone. So for many many years the right answer to the question at the top of this post was “When it happens”.
I’d rather not return to that sort of answer but
is the sort of expectation that can / could force us to
No I didn’t - Mark Walsh did
I’m sure Cocoa was a beast, even if it took quite a bit longer than expected, a job well done. And I am super excited to see the iOS stuff in action, my products need to move in that direction and I have put off trying to get into OBJ-C to see what Xojo has to offer. But in those instances we have to make business decisions. We have to make our best guess at the roadmaps of the tools we use. Otherwise we are always in reactive mode. And with the rapidly changing consumer market platforms, we don’t have nearly as much of a luxury in that area as we would like. If it is going to be usable sometimes in 2014 it is worth waiting for. If it is going run over by years, then I need to just bite the bullet and get started with OBJ-C.
My apologies Norman, I thought you brought up the old post.
The way I told, yes; people do that, all the time. They don’t lie as they set just expectations, not commitments.
Decide based on what you have not what you might have because, as you know, things can change and the further out in the future they are the more they might change.
If you have a need to be writing iOS apps immediately you might want to use Xcode only because we have not shipped yet and we’ll still be a V1.0 product when we do. But further out than our expected ship date you might be able to wait things out.
But there are things we cannot tell you with certainty today because we don’t know them.
There are things we know, things we know we don’t know, and things we don’t know that we don’t know.
[quote=32716:@Rick A.]The way I told, yes; people do that, all the time. They don’t lie as they set just expectations, not commitments.
[/quote]
Tune into the @xojo Twitter feed, then. All caution seems thrown to the wind there today.
If you give a too far date, your customers go elsewhere (your concurent) and buy the near date they told you !
On the other hand, everyone already says: this is software, software release date are hard to predict.
NOW: we are software developper and cannot ask for things we know the answer is unpredictable.