Well, there are things going on at Slim Devices to which *I'm* not privy, but I'll go out on a limb and say a few things. At any other company, I would run such a post by my manager, and probably his manager, and maybe the PR director, but things are still "open" enough here that I think my own judgment is good enough for this post.
The changes going on at Slim Devices broadly fall into two groups: Logitech wants to capitalize on its investment after the acquisition, and Slim Devices wants to use the financial backing of Logitech to organize itself into a well-run business unit instead of a startup running on a shoestring. Add into the mix that all of us here are very mindful that we don't want to lose any of the Slim Devices "magic", whether that be engineering, quality, customer service, or "community". Within a few months, you're going to see Squeezeboxes in major retail outlets for which the old Slim Devices could have never manufactured enough units, and advertising in places the old Slim Devices could have never afforded. Logitech has manufacturing and marketing muscle, and it's not something that's just available to us, it's part of Logitech's plan to sell a lot of Slim Devices products. And that's a good thing, because... We can now afford to take a few risks on new products. I'm still going to follow Sean's lead on not announcing anything before its time, but there are projects that Sean and Dean have wanted to do for a long time, as well as some things that might work well with Logitech's more traditional customer base that are now gathering steam. These two areas are where we're spending our energy. Throwing out the Slim Devices way of doing business is not part of the plan. I have been in meetings at Logitech now where we discuss products that have been flops (or worse, are in the process of flopping). I don't want to insult my new coworkers, but many of these flops are due to very strange thinking from a Slim Devices point of view. You can spend a lot of time doing market research and interface design and writing specifications and developing hardware and software, release it, fix some bugs, and start the whole cycle over again... Or you can make it powerful enough and flexible enough and open enough that the *customers* can *turn it into* the product that *they want to use*. Naturally there still has to be support and direction on the Slim Devices side, but there are definitely real business benefits to the Open Source approach. Now, looking back at what I've written, can you see where in these plans and priorities killing Slimserver would fit in? Do see where a plan to spend a lot of legal and development energy reinventing the wheel and ending up with a proprietary software package would fit in? Me neither. -- ChrisOwens Christopher Owens QA Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED] (650) 210-9400 x717 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ChrisOwens's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4240 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32904 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
