Good response - ask the customer what he wants and then help him achieve it.
It all starts with stability - compatibility - performance. The ASF has a tough job ahead of it, getting millions of users to change. Not an easy task in today's environment Peter -----Original Message----- From: Ben Hyde [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 7:24 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: the wheel of httpd-dev life is surely slowing down, solutions please I've quite a few ideas and opinions about why things might be quiet these days. I'd recommend against taking any of these ideas too seriously. Here is an idea: we have gotten out in front of the users. Products have features and overtime they get more and more features. Users have some ability to absorb features and overtime their ability to do so rises. For young products the users are ahead of the product ("What do you mean it doesn't to CGI scripting!?"). For older products the mismatch gets smaller and smaller ("I need massive virtual hosting!"). My joke about this is that the process is a perfect behaviorist training loop. Young products get strong feedback which trains their sponsors to listen to customer demand and add features. Overtime that feedback peter's out, which trains them to listen more and more carefully. Finally they get to the point where they listen to the wind and they hear feature demands in it's ghostly moans. That's call market research. :-) Commercial products tend to overshoot the users. Consider Microsoft's office products! Open source is less given to overshoot. If features only go in because a user volunteered to do the work that acts; to some degree to temper the chance of overshoot. Open source can still overshoot. Exceptional users may add features that are rarely needed. Firms, lead by market research or other in-house demands, may volunteer. So, one theory is that we have overshot the user's ability to absorb new features. Some amount of overshoot is to be expected on any major release. Solutions? Well if you buy this model - and like I said it's only one - then the trick is to aid users in climbing the learning curve. Figuring out where the user demand is and then helping to bridge the gap using the new features. Helping all the complementary products absorb the new stuff. This may seem like an argument that we have filled out our ecological niche; but it's slightly different than that. The niche isn't fixed, it is a free variable as well. - ben
