At 10:58 PM 2/10/2004 -0600, Paul Schreiber wrote:
>h) Looking ahead: I've learned my lesson. I'm not going to announce ∗anything∗
>until it's ready to ship. I mean, sitting here, with manuals, etc. ready to go
>out the door. So, it may be 8 months from now until something 'new' shows up.
>But, I think that's the best way to set expectations going forward.
Paul,
Thank you for moving to this model. I know it is very hard and every
engineer loves to share about the cool thing(s) they are working on but it
really comes down to setting proper expectations to get the best customer
satisfaction. Folks will wait a long time for stuff they want, witness
your customer base and backlog. The problem is that schedules are
notoriously hard to keep accurate the further out they get. I know, I live
it every day managing SW engineers and large engineering projects. So, the
only thing you can do is to announce stuff when it is ready or clearly on a
schedule that you have 95% or greater confidence in. This will also mean
perhaps a bit more speculation on your part on what your customers want,
although there are ways to address it through careful surveys. We will
lose the opportunity to comment more on new designs and panel layouts but
IMO, that is not a large loss in order to have greater predictability.
Eric