Thanks, wer. I split it from the Apology thread because I think it deserves it's own focus.
You're in favor of stability. So am I. But we have to balance. Our "solution" is to add capabilities (not just features) at the beginning of the cycle and shift to emphasis on stability in the middle of the cycle.
We try to take problem reports seriously, though perhaps 1/3 of the reports are problems related to antivirus, bad drivers, misconfiguration, networking issues, etc. We tend to focus on problems that are reported by more than 1 or 2 users.
I just took a look at the Release Notes on our wiki:
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Release_Notes_MC24For MC24, there were:
210 Fixes
261 Changes
124 New
Many of the changes we do are to address user suggestions.
Here's the Too Easy thread:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,112049.0.htmlI tried to mark the ones we did as "Done" in red, but I'm sure I missed a few. Why didn't we do them all? Some suggestions were covered by features that were already there. Some were bigger than we had time for. Some we didn't like. Some we didn't get to. But that thread did get considerable attention. It was helpful to have the suggestions.
Frequently people make suggestions that seem obvious in retrospect. Why didn't we do that already? Just oversight. We benefit immensely from the collective intelligence and experience of our forum users.
Why don't we just do what our users want?
a. They often don't agree. HTPC vs. Audiophile segments, for example. We try to provide solutions. The
Simplified Interface is a good example.
b. We don't like the idea or we think it has a limited lifetime. MQA, for example. Support for streaming services that are financially unstable (Tidal).
c. Roadblocks. Netflix doesn't allow good support. Nor do many other services.
d. Cost/benefit. A few users would dearly love to have something that nobody else cares about. MQA.
Why do we do things our users aren't asking for?
a. It's fun.
b. Because it has a promising future. Panel, for example, solves the problem of having to support so many different screen sizes and configurations. Android, though we chose to build a solution that is much more ambitious than might have been done.
c. We feel a need for it.
A State of the Union would be nice, but I'm not smart enough or patient enough to survey the landscape of digital media and project a future path we should follow.
Instead, I try to follow what our customers want and engage with them when possible. Our development is incredibly iterative. We've done something like 1000 builds in the last ten years and maybe half of those were stable enough to make it to the Download Page. That's quite an accomplishment. This is a very talented team of people.
JRiver has been doing this since 1998. I think we must now have one of the longest intense development efforts of any software. I'm very proud of that and very grateful to you and everyone else who has supported it.