Re: Maybe we shouldn't spam the world with the 1.0 release announcement?

From: Eric W. Sink (eric@sourcegear.com)
Date: Mon May 06 2002 - 23:18:12 EDT

  • Next message: Martin Sevior: "Press Release the next version."

    Now let me get this straight:

    You've just completed four years of development, and you're going
    to keep it quiet because of one of Joel's recent rants?

    I disagree. :-)

    I really like reading Joel Spolsky's stuff, but he's not always
    right. He just knows how to make it *sound* like he's always
    right. They have a training course in Redmond which teaches
    this particular skill.

    IMNSHO you should announce the 1.0 releases to the world. Let
    everybody see the app. It's cool.

    You might consider explictly saying in your release announcements
    that the app does not yet have tables, and they are top priority for
    version 1.2. If you do this, you'll get fewer downloads, but you
    will *not* get "80% of those reading the announcement will
    download AbiWord, find that it doesn't have tables, and will
    never ever touch it again". Set the expectations clearly and
    let people decide whether to try it now or wait for 1.2.

    If you really wanted to apply Joel's essay, you would have
    just postponed 1.0 until it had tables. (I would probably have
    disagreed with that idea if asked.) But now that you have a 1.0
    release, I certainly think the world should know about it. 

    --
Eric W. Sink
eric@sourcegear.com
http://www.ericsink.com/

    ----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin Sevior" <msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au>
To: "Hubert Figuiere" <hfiguiere@teaser.fr>
Cc: "Eric W. Sink" <eric@sourcegear.com>; "AbiWord Dev List"
<abiword-dev@abisource.com>
Sent: Monday, May 06, 2002 8:29 PM
Subject: Re: Maybe we shouldn't spam the world with the 1.0 release
announcement?

    >
>
> On Tue, 7 May 2002, Martin Sevior wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > On Mon, 6 May 2002, Hubert Figuiere wrote:
> >
> > > On lun, 2002-05-06 at 14:48, Jesper Skov wrote:
> > > > There's some truth to be found in Joel's text here:
> > > >
> > > > http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/PickingShipDate.html
> > > >
> > > > 80% of those reading the announcement with download AbiWord, find
that
> > > > it doesn't have tables, and will never ever touch it again.
> > > >
> > > > I'm sure enough people, who are not judging a product by features
they
> > > > don't use anyway, will find and start using AbiWord 1.0, even
without
> > > > announcing it all over the place.
> > >
> > > I confirm that. I think I should agree with Jskov. Wait for 1.2 with
> > > Table and other stuff to announce our product to the world.
> > >
> > > Announcing 1.0.1 on SF, freshmeat and other free-software oriented is
> > > fine. Upload them to major software archives (even for Windows) is.
> > >
> >
> > Hmm the original motivation for making a big noise at the 1.0 feature
set
> > point was to increase our user base by at least an order of magnitude.
> > We're pretty well known in the Linux landscape but almost totally
unknown
> > to the Windows user base. We could certainly use more Windows
developers.
> >
> > I'll read that article however and hold off on the spam until there is
> > concensus.
> >
>
> OK I read the article. I can see we'll be beaten about the head for not
> providing tables. However we do provide a theasurus, whih Open Office
> doesn't. We can do spellchecking in 30 languages simultaneous, which Open
> Office doesn't. We have many usability edges over Open Office - like
> modeless dialogs.
>
> We are tons smaller than openoffice and we do run on XDarwin which open
> Office doesn't.
>
> I think we have enough feature points in our favour to do a major
> announcement.
>
> In addition with 1.0.2 we will have integration with evolution.
> which is very rapidly becoming the unix email client of choice.
>
> It is really cool the way this works. Install rpm with *.oaf file - word
> processing docs appear in evolution.
>
> So big announcement of 1.0.1 now follow up in a couple of weeks with 1.0.2
> with evolution integration.
>
> Makes a nice 1 - 2 strategy.
>
> OK, I'm clearly a humble amauter on Marketing. Could Paul or Eric provide
> some advice?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Martin
>
>
>

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