Quote:
Originally Posted by K-Thom
Honestly, what's Bookeen supposed to do? Write a post "Folks, you're right! We goofed. We still do. Big time. We just don't seem to get the firmware done. If we remove one bug, two new pop up right away. Don't know when or if the firmware ever will be done. Sorry."
[snip]
As much as it bugs me - the way Bookeen behaves is the only one I could advise.
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Can't really say that I agree. Of course, nobody is asking them to publish something like the above, and it wouldn't help us customers at all. What we want is some information about what to expect.
There are plenty of companies who post 2-3 lines on their blog every week so people know what is going on and can get a feeling for what to expect. 2-3 lines is not an amount of work where anyone can claim it's keeping them from doing their real work but it helps great deal on the customer relationship front.
I am sorry, but telling the customers "it'll be there soon" and that's the last we hear for **months** is clearly not enough. Plus there is always the possibilty to axe some features if they just can't get them done. It's happening all the time in the software business: You can't get feature XY finished and stable and you already missed the release date? Well, then cut that feature, release what we have and put that feature on the list for the next release.
Just as an example what *can* be done: I have bought a Freecom Musicpal 2 years ago (just 2-3 months before I bought the Cybook). The first update I did was to version number 1.44, now we are at 1.65. Every 2-3 months they release a new beta firmware (clearly labelled as beta with all the warnings that you install at your own risk, etc.). If people then post a lot of bugs and problems they release a new beta 2-3 months later and so on. When enough people are satisfied with the existing features they declare that FW to be a stable release.
During those two years we have had only 2 or 3 stable releases so it's pretty similar to Bookeen's Cybook. But through the betas there was a lot of information what is going on. People gave feedback, people suggested things, there was active involvement. Of course, there are always people who are unhappy: Complaining why their feature was still not incorporated or turning angry because something was still not working in the third beta. There have even been incidents where a new feature had such serious bugs that it had to be removed and only came back 3 or 4 betas later. But the bottom line is that the community knew what was going on and what to expect.
And I won't withhold a comment from a couple of days ago which made me smile thinking of what mobilereaders would say to that:
One of the users asked support when to expect the next FW because the last release was "already 8 weeks ago" :-)