Re: Power Users and TTG?

[kfrank@xxxxxxxx]

I guess I ought to resoponse to Harmon Seaver's comments about
what XyWrite users want and whether TTG has "lost touch (or
perhaps never really understood in the first place) ...the
essential nature of XyWriters." I certainly have no desire to
get into an argument, but it is comments like that that seem
unnecessarily hostile, and appear to me to reflect a lack of
insight into what it takes to survive in the software business.

First, I believe we very much do understand what our users want,
and I do not necesarily think it is "the most technologically
advanced system they can get" as Mr. Seaver suggested. For the
most part our users are writers, and I believe what is important
to them is having a system that facilitates the production,
manipulation and publishing of that written work to the greatest
extent possible. I believe their interest in customizing XyWrite
stems primarily from the desire to have a writer's tool that
most closely reflects their way of working, integrates tightly
into their evironment, and automates a number of the things they
do. They want that tool to be fast, lean and stable. In my
opinion, advanced technology for its own sake is not a very high
priority.

Like many of you, I have long preferred the speed and efficiency
and stability of a DOS environment over a GUI. But as a
businessperson, I cannot ignore the realities of the busines
world in which we operate, and for better or worse there are no
longer enough customers for DOS products to support the cost of
continued development and support.

So, since we can't survive if we don't sell software, what we are
about is trying to design products providing in a GUI
environment the things our users prized in the DOS versions.
While we still have not accomplished that goal to my
satisfaction, I believe (and a number of our users confirm) that
we are getting there. Putting aside some of the issues we still
need to address, such as the draft font, column tables, further
improvements to stability, Orbis, Ibid, etc., our current
Windows product delivers a combination of DOS and GUI
capabilities no other product can match. The command line,
speed, ascii file structure, relatively (for a Windows product)
compact executables and customizability (yes we need to provide
more docs) are exactly what XyWrite users want. We need to take
our base product and expand it to be a more universal front end
for a variety of text applications, we need to give it more
robust capabilities for communicating intelligently with other
processes and types of information, and we need to continue to
further extend the core functionalilty for managing and
producing text.

Also, I think you need to understand that if TTG had not taken
over the product when we did, this discussion would not be
taking place at all, since XyWrite would have ceased to exist.
There would have been no XyWrite 4 or XyWrite for Windows and no
talk of what is next.

I would hope that if you set aside you personal biases and look
at the bigger picture from our perspective, you would be a
little more evenhanded in your comments and work with us to
provide quality products that continue to serve this market.

Kenneth Frank