General Consultant Discussion

Interesting piece on Google........... http://www.usatoday.com/money/smallbusiness/story/2012-05-27/small-business-can-learn-from-google/55188670/1 Too bad the folks in Irvine are not on board with this philosophy...........

I think you meant to say ""are not on board"". It's easier to just blame the channel for everything.

Thanks. Fixed it. Yes, the culture is that they play not to lose instead of playing to win. It is so easy to say the bug is a WAD instead of saying, you are right, it doesn't make sense at all and I will get it fixed......

Certainly the part about focus on the customer and what they really need could be done better by Sage. But some the iterate often and fail early stuff is hard to do in a market made up of businesses, not individuals. and worse, Communicating through (or at least with) a channel, which has bandwidth issues. Google's products are also generally point products, not process-driven products. I've worked in channel companies, and it is really, really hard to keep the communication coherent. (I think Sage does a pretty good at keeping coherent communication.) But there is different feel to an organization where employees generally feel safe in saying or trying things not approved by the CEO. Google feels like that. Sage does not.

It really scares me when people encourage companies to release junk and ask their customers to tell them how to fix it...we accept quality levels (or complete lack thereof) from software that is totally unacceptable for any other product. I think that is why there is so much resentment to paying annual maintenance. ""I already paid for a product, and now you want me to keep paying in the hope that someday it will be fully functional?

Sage does seem to have the ""fail early and often"" part down - it's the ""learn from those failures"" they are not so good at.

I didn't mean to imply that I thought it was acceptable to put crap code out there. Goodness knows, Sage already does that in the first version releases. It used to be that a lot of these bugs were caught durinb beta but Sage seems to think that Beta is a waste of time anymore. As a long time beta tester, we only get a cursory look at the code before the general release. Any issues we catch usually are slated for the first PU release. I've seen several issues that weren't fixed until PU 3 or 4. What caught my eye is that Google expects their engineers to FIX the code and even make it better when issues are discovered. I almost get the impression that they can ""shut the line down"" if they find a defect that is a big issue. The culture at Sage requires that you leave your brain at the door and don't forget to pick it up on the way out. Don't you DARE tell the king that he has no clothes on...............

@JeffSchwenk - I didn't think you meant it that way, it's just that the article reminded me of a book on HTML5 programming I read recently whose whole pitch was ""just get something out there, don't worry about quality."" Kind of the programmer's version of the CEO who only thinks of this quarter's numbers.

Irvine could learn something from Scottsdale, maybe. The SLX group stated a goal for upcoming V8 release to be be ""bug free."" Of course, there are caveats, but I think they mean it. It's release to Beta has been delayed over 6 weeks, probably because of that. (One reason for this goal, is that there are a lot of confirmed bugs that just never seem to get fixed.) SLX's quality issues have been all over the map, but the past few years pretty good. Part of it is that when something goes bad in that app, it goes very bad, so a HF is pushed out pretty quickly. But then, SLX has a different attitude toward publicizing bugs: it now has has a site where you can search on all bugs, open or closed. It tells you their status and planned fix date. Not perfect, but far better than my experience with Irvine.