First off, I want to be clear that I'm not complaining about being asked to pay more money. I appreciate the fact that JRiver is a company interested in the bottom line and, as such, charges what they feel is a reasonable fee for their product and one the market will bear (as evidenced by our presence here and the money in their bank accounts).
But it also should be noted that JRiver is a company that pays phenomenal attention to the concerns and comments of their customers and along with that openness comes a responsibility. A responsibility that is being observed in this thread.
I wasn't around for the transition from 8 to 9 or 7 to 8 or any of the other transitions. I'm sure people complained about it then just like we're complaining about it now. The question becomes whether JRiver learned anything from those past experiences to apply to this one.
If the lesson you learned was "People complain and then get over it," that's not a productive lesson and perhaps illustrates a serious flaw in the way you interact with your customers.
I don't think that's really the lesson you learned.
I think you learned "Some people complain and leave, but lots of others stay." And I think that's an equally damaging presumption to make. Yes, some of us may leave over this decision, others will complain but eventually return and some will remain firmly behind JRiver.
I think, though, that the lesson you should have learned before and should certainly learn now is that daily builds build damaging expectations. Now, I know that this is going to be a fairly unpopular stance but I would ask you to think not as daily visitors to this site, but as an occasional visitor who drops in maybe once a month to check on progress.
As an occasional visitor, you drop in every once in a while to see a product continually reshaping itself, tracking down bugs adding panes, moving trees around, changing the GUI. And you think to yourself, "Well, it's not really finished and there's some stuff that doesn't work so great, but they're constantly changing it so we'll get there sooner or later."
And this brings us to our second problem. There are too many poorly executed features in MC 9. Hairstyle never should have been in MC 9 if you weren't planning on finishing it in this version of the software. If TV viewing and recording doesn't work 95% of the time (I have no idea if it does or doesn't, I just needed another example of something) and you're not planning on having all the kinks ironed out, don't include it. Don't make sweeping changes to your GUI (whether you can work the bugs out or not) without transitioning to a new software version.
Software needs to have every choice made before it ever winds up in the hands of the consumer so that incremental releases are bug fixes, not adding new features, not changing the GUI, just bug fixes.
To that end, I think JRiver needs to reshape customer expectations by sealing beta testing with the occasional preview build if you feel like you need customer input on feature sets or GUI design. Have the details nailed before you release MC 10 and don't release a 10.1. Having to release a 10.1 means that there's something you didn't put in 10 the first time around. If it's so neat, get it in there the first time. If it isn't worth waiting for, ship it in MC 11.
JRiver is preparing to move onto a fairly large national stage (just a guess, but a fairly safe one I presume given the "big news" and the proliferation of online music stores). I urge you to consider the events occuring here and possibly learn something new from them.
skills
ps - Seriously, congratulations on a fantastic product, your workmanship and attention to your customers is something that every person at JRiver should be very, very proud of.
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Topic: Seriously cheesed off (Read 11642 times)