[Info-vax] Customer Feedback, Tactics and Strategies (was: Re: OpenVMS servers and clusters as a cloud service)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-01-06 18:31:32 +0000, Kerry Main said:

> Agree Cust feedback and support is critical.

For near-term and near-horizon changes?  Sure.   For bug reports?  
Definitely.   For current app loads and trends?  Definitely.   Customer 
feedback is beneficial for these sorts of issues.

For suggestions of features and capabilities more significant or 
ground-breaking and innovative?  That's been rare.

Suggestions of the scale and scope and market viability that that a 
VSI-scale vendor can reasonably create and deploy?  That's rarer still.

Customers seldom suggest enhancements that make more short-term work 
for the end-customer.  Even if the solution will be a better one for 
that customer, and/or for other current or new customers.

The difference here is one of tactics and of strategy.  Of the 
differences between patches and updates, and the gotta-have-it major 
new-feature releases.  Of evolution and of revolution.

A good product team will take a look at the incremental suggestions, 
and at the bug reports, and adjust those suggestions and requirements 
to account for the development time involved, and implement the results 
that are of the most interest across the important parts of the 
customer base.

A great product team will also look at completely different approaches 
for answering those same suggestions and requirements, and at ways that 
are simpler and easier longer-term, and possibly at the cost of some 
shorter-term end-user efforts getting there.   At completely different 
approaches and problems, too.   At fixing problems that the 
end-customers don't even realize that they have.  Yet.

Put another way... customer feedback?   Useful, but for incremental 
changes and fixes.   Learning what the customers are doing and why and 
how they're currently doing it?   Definitely valuable.




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Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC