Re: Participation by top execs

[Dorothy Day day@xxxxxxxx]

On Fri, 1 Nov 1996, Lee Hickling wrote:

> Somebody wrote (was it Wendell Cochran?):
>
> > Not many commercial software top execs trade public msgs
> >online with users.
>
> I know of a few. Fridrik Skulason, author of F-PROT, and Alan Solomon, head
> of Dr. Solomon's anti-virus software company, are very active on the VIRUS-L
> List. So are a number of other persons identified with, thought not the
> heads of, AV software companies.
> Peter Tattam, author of Trumpet Winsock, regularly reads the Trumpet
> newsgroup, and posts helpful replies.
> There must be others. That no one at TTG is active on this list is one of
> the most damaging of all the complaints about the company that I've seen here.

We have apples & oranges here. Individual creators of programs like the
ones named above, often shareware in their initial form, get highly
engaged in dealing with all aspects of their products and users. Before
email proliferated, such people spent more of their day on the phone
than they probably should have. Steve Seibert at NB was the epitome of
this type of behavior--always listened to users, and incorporated *all*
their suggestions in the (ever) forthcoming next version. Constant
states of exhaustion and near financial bankruptcy are often inseparable
from this pattern. Some might think that's being *too* responsive.

With email discussion lists, the same danger to participate till you
drop (and burn out) exists. The founder of Pro-Cite was a constant
presence on the email list formed by users of that product. Members of
the list vented whatever frustrations they had with the latest version,
and he patiently dealt with all of them. Finally, he quietly sold the
product to a larger company and took a well-earned vacation. Company
participation on the list is no longer anything like what it was: mostly
one-way announcements now.

Larger companies may or may not assign staff to deal with online forums.
That is not without cost or drain from time for other tasks (like
product development or phone support). Small companies may not be able
to affort that cost. Sometimes individual staff voluntarily answer
questions on their own after-hours time. I've seen this occur on a
number of usenet newsgroups, and a newgroup may be a better environment
for that kind of support: postings are threaded and have a certain
amount of longevity for readers to dip in and check what's going on.

I don't think some users (particularly academics) have a very good sense
of what else the company may be dealing with besides one's own burning
question or problem. We rarely pour so many self-centered demands on a
print publisher (fix this problem in your next edition; your prices are
too high; you promised that big reference work out in Spring, and here
it is Summer...) Somehow we get much more personally involved in our
software possessions and their future development, and how the company
should interact with us. Maybe we need to get a grip (and a life...)

	--Dorothy

---
Dorothy Day			
School of Library and Information Science
Indiana University
day@xxxxxxxx