Newbie4 wrote: ↑Sat Dec 02, 2017 10:35 pm
You said:
I've taken what seems to be an unusual path to communicating with LiveCode: I communicate with them.
And if you have a good one, present it clearly with a business case and there's a good chance you'll at least get a reply. They may even act on it.
Maybe for you, but for the rest of us we usually don't even get an acknowledgement much less a reply, discussion or even a "thank you for the idea..." They fail to answer most emails.
You may notice that my sigline here includes "LiveCode Community Liaison". Part of that role is to solicit feedback from the community and coordinate between projects the community wants to accomplish and resources internal to the company needed to execute those projects.
If you have a specific actionable suggestion with at least a summary of a business case justifying the expense I'll be happy to include it in my next meeting with them.
As for these forums:
It is commonly known that
For every customer who complains, there are 26 customers who don’t say anything.
Often, they’ll simply get fed up and leave.
That’s why customers who complain are giving you an extraordinarily valuable gift: insight into what’s probably making many more customers unhappy than just the person who chose to tell you about it.
If they do not monitor these forums, how do they know how they are doing? Every company needs to pay close attention to its customers and listen to them.
They should be active participants in this forum to keep a pulse on their customers. Many companies recognize this responsibility and monitor their public perception and performance. They even monitor Twitter, Facebook and other places their customers are in order to keep them happy and be more successful in their public image
Sounds good. The part about how each voiced complaint represents a far larger number sounds like the sort of thing I tell my clients all the time. LiveCode is aware of that basic principle too. Every business that lasts beyond three years has already learned that, or they wouldn't have been able to last longer than the majority that fold much earlier.
When comparing activities between companies, it can be helpful to consider relevant details like: What is the total staff size in those companies? How are those companies funded? How many conversions do they get through those online activities?
In your own business, what percentage of your payroll do your spend on social media outreach?
I agree that those things are useful, and LC does some of them better than others. The use-livecode list tends to work well for the core dev team in ways that most of the forums don't; the forums are vast and much of what happens here is the sort of user-to-user support they're designed for, so the core team doesn't regularly schedule time to read each of the hundreds of posts that crop up here every week. But you will find LC staff in the Engine Contributors and LC Builder forums fairly regularly.
Sure, they could and arguably should do more. There are more features I'd like to see too. And some pet bugs I'd like to see fixed. And the things I want are different from the things Jacque wants, or what Klaus wants, or Trevor, or anyone else.
Of all those people, can you tell us which ones the company should say "No" to so they can pull staff from development to enhance socmed outreach?
Because LiveCode Ltd is no different from your business, or mine, or any other. Everything is a game of tradeoffs between limited resources*. Even the Big Four (Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google) have to be mindful of resource management. Every business does.
LC has a team size well suited for what they need to do technically, but I would agree it's short for what would be ideal with regard to outreach.
If you're in a position to sponsor payroll for adding new team members to handle that, I'm sure Ian would love to talk with you.
But in the meantime, the LC discussions here, on the list, on FB, LinkedIn, G+, and all over the web are for the most part, as they are with most software communities, well handled by helpful volunteers.
This works well for most things people use those venues for, which are generally about learning and using LiveCode.
But they are not implemented to replace LC's email In Box, which leads us to:
If a company has the same problems and complaints over a span of 10 years and does nothing to remedy them, then that company does not deserve to be in business. They are not listening to their customers. They are not communicating with them.
Well then, as you suggest, that would be a self-correcting problem.
But seriously, who exactly should they be listening to? Is my opinion more, or less, important to them as someone who may be interested in LC but has not yet purchased a license? After all, they already have my money, and the person not yet in the forums is where platform growth comes from.
There are many segments in this audience, each with different priorities, and a larger segment of potential future users on whom future growth depends and whose needs are different still.
Any conversation that doesn't take the tradeoffs or the nuances of the challenge of marketing into account is unlikely to be effective.
Let's look at how this plays out here:
Look through the posts in this forum and pay attention to the recurring themes, complaints and ongoing threads.
Yes, let's. But as with any business proposal, look carefully and soberly. Let's be prepared to discover things we may not have noticed before. No one is expert at all things. Just as we feel the company could benefit from learning some things, we ourselves always have new opportunities to learn too.
When we look at this earnestly, we do indeed see many recurring threads, many of them quite long, with a great many posts over a great many years...
...from about half a dozen people.
There are a handful of other posts and threads from the occasional passersby (not all of whom have had earnest intent, but we needn't name names), but by and large while the number of
posts may be large the number of
people complaining is not nearly so large.
Out of many thousands of users, active users in this forum are a small percentage. Of active users, most are here to learn LiveCode, and they seem to be finding what they need (thanks to Klaus, Bernd, and the others who provide such great support here). By the time we look at the subset of a subset of a subset of users who keep voicing the same concerns over and over, in all honesty I think we're looking at a fraction of 1%.
Meanwhile, consider developers like Mark Talutto, Ken Ray, Trevor DeVore, Sean Cole, Greg Miller, David Simpson, Devin Asay, Jacque Gay, Tom Glod, Matt Meier, Ralf Bitter, Dave Kilroy, Brian Milby, Tore Nielsen, Max Shafer, Jim Lambert, etc. (too many to name, and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head): how often do they post complaints in the user-to-user support forum?
All of those developers make great apps with LiveCode, and some have built businesses around their LiveCode apps. They understand the complexities of development and business management. None of them believe LC or LC Ltd is perfect, but they respect the inherent difficulty of the task at hand. When they have suggestions, they're well presented in constructive, actionable terms, with a business case, and delivered to the company, rather than delivering them to people who cannot act on them.
In short, what we see here is something I've seen in the Apple forums, Adobe forums, Ubuntu forums, and many other venues I've frequented over the years: those with the most experience managing projects of similar scope complain the least, and contribute the most. They have a lot at stake, and a good understanding of the challenges of running a business to know what it takes to be successful.
Good feedback is of course extremely valuable.
But let's do our part to make sure it's
good feedback.
Let's focus on specific, actionable tasks. Let's consider the budget required to execute them and the business case for the investment. Let's consider the opportunity cost that comes with everything every company does (doing anything means not doing something else).
And perhaps most importantly, let's assume good intentions and be prepared to learn from the core team as well.
They're not stupid or drunk, as someone might get the impression from some of the random repetitive repetitive kvetching that goes on here. They're quite smart, actually. And damned earnest about success for the platform. After all, if LC stops being maintained all it means for us is about a year of retooling for another language, but for them it's their careers.
So let's engage in any discussion about how we want to spend other people's time and money with a healthy professional respect for the people we want to influence.
Together, the community and the core team can accomplish much. I believe that despite the challenges inherent in selling a dev tool in the 21st century, LiveCode has a good opportunity ahead to claim its rightful place among the world's great languages.
* This post is already so insanely long that I'll indulge in a semi-OT link:
Billionaire LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman can trace his business success back to a childhood hobby he still loves decades later
http://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin ... gy-2017-11
I've started studying board games over the last year, initially as a form of what I like to think of as "transparent systems design": with computer game the magic happens under the hood where you can't see it; board games offer similar resource-tradeoff dynamics, but in a format made of cardboard, where every aspect of the mechanics is laid bare.
Over time I've come to appreciate them on another level too: as the founder of LinkedIn discovered early on, learning to work within the constraints of resource management is a skill that pays dividends in many aspects of life.
<getting the popcorn>