Re: TTG marketing woes

[Peter Knupfer pknupfer@xxxxxxxx]

Harmon Seaver argues:
>
>>(The market is getting what it wants. Windows95 and Word .. They also buy
>>Geraldo Rivero and Bill Clinton .. When the masses decide they want speed
>>and productivity, we'll all be famous. - but don't hold your breath eh?)
>
>  So true! A Taoist proverb says that the people get exactly the type of
>government they deserve -- a crooked populace gets a crooked king. And a
>mediocre mentality begats mediocre software, I guess. It's just part of the
>dumbing down process promoted in the school system. Win95 -- computing for
>the clueless -- it installs easily, so it must be great, right?
>Like packing a suitcase for a 2 week vacation -- throw in a pair of socks
>and shorts, it's easy and quick. Not like trying to get your whole wardrobe
>in there.

This is simplistic. Products evolve because markets enable consumers and
producers to interact. I know a number of extremely intelligent,
computer-savvy scholars who are delighted with Win95, who use Word, and who
do not want to spend their days trying to figure out what a "protection
fault" is. Those of us who prefer to expend our mental energies getting
smart about something other than our computers would not consider the
advent of the mouse, of GUI, or other shortcuts to be part of a
"dumbing-down" process (one could just as easily say that moving from the
typewriter to the word processor was a "dumbing-down" process). Word is an
excellent program; its widespread use isn't due to slick marketing and MS's
size & influence alone. The mouse is a godsend to handicapped people whose
writing talents are not defined by whether they can type.

In the case of XW, TTG has ignored its market, as Robert Bidinotto has so
accurately described it. I started with XYIII+ because the documentary
editing project I was working with had adopted it and completely programmed
it for the arcane work we were doing. I carried it into my own writing and
followed TTG through the Signature fiasco to XY 4. When XW came out, I
dutifully upgraded and encountered bugs. It wasn't until, in frustration,
I plunked down the sawbucks for long phone calls to TTG did I discover that
they had upgraded to 4.12 -- they never even sent their registered users a
postcard to say this had been done.

TTG's disconnect with its non-programming users hurts the effectiveness of
the program. Is it a sign of "dumbness" to want a word processing program
to convert files back and forth from and to DOS text without having to load
a new printer file, print to disk, call it back up for editing, and save it
again? Is it a sign of "dumbness" to ask a word processor to create a
table or insert a footer without having to figure out such arcania as GU,
PL nom, BT, BO? (One of the conference proceedings I was submitting to
required all incoming work to be formatted in two full-justified newsletter
snaking columns for the body and the notes. Trying to do this in XW drove
me crazy and took hours to get it to work correctly; the notes kept
marching down the page and disappearing into the margins, and because XW
would not consistently scroll them full-page in graphic view, I had to keep
switching around and reconfiguring just to see if it was coming out right.)
Is it a sign of "dumbness" to ask a Windows program to drag and drop its
files into print manager and actually have them print out? XW won't do it.

I'm certain that many of my questions have simple answers; but the years of
neglect by TTG has turned those simple problems into headaches that make me
wonder if I should continue to use the product. There are so many
excellent features to XW that I'm very reluctant to abandon it, but TTG
sure isn't helping much.

Peter Knupfer
Kansas State University