Nice concept, but impractical. Having worked both sides of the fence, the reality is that if you don't start marketing the damn product until it's finished, you've probably missed the window in the customer's buying cycle to influence his plans with your product. Hence, the new product may well be a masterful work of programming, but there it will likely remain, on the virtual shelf.
Ideally, marketing/sales types should do some extra work and get a customer to FUND THE DEVELOPMENT, or at least a significant portion of it. (This is tough selling; but golf season is over:-) In this way, marketing is assured that the concept is sufficiently compelling to yield some market success, burn rates are reduced, and programmers have some security of income, and an expectation that their contribution will be used and appreciated by a real, live customer. It's also a great way to gauge the market without spending a huge amount of cash to develop the right product for the wrong market.
I've done it. It works, and tremendously improves both communication and relations between engineers/developers and marketing/sales types.
...hmmm.... somewhere around here I've got a 5 1/4 real floppy diskette with the version of Tetris® shortly after it came out of Russia® (Does Hasbro own the rights to that, too?:-)
So if I try to auction it off (collector's item dontcha know), do I have to pay some sort of royalty to His Royal Hasbro-ness?
Nice try for a suggestion. However, after two releases, how likely do you think it will be for all the Windowses to remain compatible? We will return to the bad ol' days of incompatible Intel-arch OSes... and what about the Unix wars of the mid-80's? More time was spent porting apps to the various almost-compatible flavours of Unix than was spent in actual development. Me to end-user: "Oh! You've got THAT version of Word. Well, that only works with MSClone2 Windows 2001 (A Space-y Odyssey)"
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Nice concept, but impractical. Having worked both sides of the fence, the reality is that if you don't start marketing the damn product until it's finished, you've probably missed the window in the customer's buying cycle to influence his plans with your product. Hence, the new product may well be a masterful work of programming, but there it will likely remain, on the virtual shelf. Ideally, marketing/sales types should do some extra work and get a customer to FUND THE DEVELOPMENT, or at least a significant portion of it. (This is tough selling; but golf season is over :-) In this way, marketing is assured that the concept is sufficiently compelling to yield some market success, burn rates are reduced, and programmers have some security of income, and an expectation that their contribution will be used and appreciated by a real, live customer. It's also a great way to gauge the market without spending a huge amount of cash to develop the right product for the wrong market.
I've done it. It works, and tremendously improves both communication and relations between engineers/developers and marketing/sales types.
...hmmm.... somewhere around here I've got a 5 1/4 real floppy diskette with the version of Tetris® shortly after it came out of Russia® (Does Hasbro own the rights to that, too? :-)
So if I try to auction it off (collector's item dontcha know), do I have to pay some sort of royalty to His Royal Hasbro-ness?
Nice try for a suggestion. However, after two releases, how likely do you think it will be for all the Windowses to remain compatible? We will return to the bad ol' days of incompatible Intel-arch OSes... and what about the Unix wars of the mid-80's? More time was spent porting apps to the various almost-compatible flavours of Unix than was spent in actual development. Me to end-user: "Oh! You've got THAT version of Word. Well, that only works with MSClone2 Windows 2001 (A Space-y Odyssey)"