Thoughts on the announcement or "With everything, stir, stir, stir...."

[Ralph Cohen]

On Fri, 08 Sep 2000 18:05:52 +0100 (BST), Simon Bowring wrote:

>>>All what work?  Or was that a wee-bit of sarcasm?
>>
>>I was taking the statement/announcement that Thomas Bradford
>>wrote at face value.
>
>Me too, I hope the PMMail developers don't get to read the fairly
>high level of adverse comments on this list, it won't do their morale 
>(and hence their productivity) any good.
>

I haven't seen any evidence that BSW pays serious attention to anything
on this list, instead generally choosing to ignore criticisms instead
of confronting their causes.


>As a developer myself, I'm aware of the problems of taking over 
>someone else's pile of code, and I know how hard it can be to get
>to grips with, make progress and find bugs etc.

As a developer, do you repeatedly set deadlines for yourself that you
do not keep and do you ignore the comments of your customers?  I am
also a developer and I certainly wouldn't consider treating my
customers in that manner.  I've found that treating my customers the
way I would like to be treated is the best policy to follow.


>PMMail is still one of the best mail clients around, and I'm glad
>Blueprint are making some more public comments about their
>intentions for it's future.
>

Yes, PMMail is one of the best mail clients around, but it could
certainly be much, much better.  But besides any fixes and
improvements, consider that BSW has never even released a list of the
fixes that were supposedly included in the late January bug fix
versions, and that there are still gross inaccuracies in the help files
that have remained uncorrected for almost a year.  These don't have
anything to do with problems taking over someone else's code, but they
do have everything to do with an attitude that your comments above may
help foster, i.e. since the customers aren't going anywhere then we
only need to expend as little effort as possible to keep selling new
licenses.  Talk is cheap.

If I were BSW and had been working on an updated version for the past
2, or is it 4 or is it 8 months(?), then I would be jumping at the
opportunity to inform my customers about any progress that had been
made (bug fixes, etc.) and would be looking for beta testers to help
iron out problems before the scheduled release in 3-1/2 months. 
Instead, what have we heard from BSW since the "Announcement",
absolutely nothing.  In fact, I wonder if BSW themselves saw the
announcement as having any significance.  Two days after it was posted,
there still wasn't any mention of it on any of the OS/2 news lists, so
I filed a report about it at os2.org which was then distributed to the
other lists.

Look, I'm glad that you are satisfied with PMMail the way it is which
may be why you don't see any need to "rock the boat".  Others of us,
however, took Southsoft and BSW at their words when they promised
various improvements and fixes which have never materialized, and that
is why we keep bitching about their broken committments.  What BSW
should really be concerned about, is the day everyone stops asking for
fixes and improvements, because that will be the day we've all moved on
to a better mail client.


Ralph Cohen

rpcohen@neurotron.com