Dance paper dance

There’s a brand new whitepaper available that was written by Keith, one of our actual writers. (As opposed to the monkey with a keyboard that posts to this blog.) He knew all about the single space nonsense that messed me up for a solid week and can literally make words dance on a page.

Darnedest thing I ever saw, words dancing like that. And to the Cha-Cha Slide no less.

Anyhow the paper has the catchy title of “Quality-Centric Application Lifecycle Management in a Down Economy” which given the economic woes of the country at the moment is rather timely. It’s super good, but my favorite part is this section:

“In a slow economy, businesses carefully consider every purchase, looking for ways to control costs and squeeze as much value as possible out of the money they spend. While flaws in software are always a concern, companies are less patient with them when cash is tight.

Releasing poor quality software builds the expectation that initial releases will be buggy. If a release date slips several times, new and potential customers may assume there is a problem with quality and will be reluctant to buy when the software is finally released. Even a single sub-par release can sow the seeds of doubt. Once doubt creeps into the minds of existing customers, they may resist purchasing new releases, preferring to allow other early adopters to work through the problems, or worse, they may decide not to buy at all.”

That’s a simple point, one that we don’t often think about, but it is absolutely true. How many times have you said you’ll wait for the first dot release or service pack before upgrading? Or perhaps wait for the second model year of a car? Or how about the 3G version of a wireless phone that you may have seen in the news recently?

Why do we do this? Part of it may be that new products don’t have all the features we want. But an even bigger part is that it is ridiculously easy to assume the first version will be buggy. Heaven help you if your products actually live up this stereotype because now it becomes an uphill (read: expensive) climb to get customers to trade their money for your stuff when a new release hits.

And that’s what it is really all about in the business of software. You spend all this time and money creating this new version and what you really want is for customers to buy it. Writing software is expensive and it is the selling of it that covers all those costs. If you have to write a dot release before the cash starts coming in then now you’re writing on credit, and playing with credit is not the optimal situation in down economic times. Sure winning the Google-just-bought-me-do-I-buy-the-black-ferrari-or-red-one-heck-I’ll-just-get-both-why-chose lottery might be a plan where credit spending is a good idea but those are some long odds and it’s a risky bet when it doesn’t come through. Like the shutter the doors and sell off the assets kind of risky or find a new gig kind of risky.

Anyhow there is lots of other good stuff in the paper besides this and I won’t ruin the rest of the story by giving it all away here. Well, I will say this, none of the words in this one actually dance. (I blame the PDF format more than anything.)