Subject: RE: [hackers-il] The curse of the prioritized TODO list

From: Chen Shapira <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2002 18:26:48 +0200

> 
> Now, to the crux of the matter.  What criteria do you use to 
> prioritize
> the items in your TODO list?
> 
> Given two items, one of which is very important for one small 
> customer,
> and another, which will allow you to increase your sales by 
> 100%, but is
> not important to any of the existing customers - which one gets higher
> priority?

A very large part of my job is to recieve requests from customers, and
prioritise them from RnD. I'm proud to mention that when prioritising,
existing customers always get higher priority.

The clash you mentioned is very rare. Usually important requests for new
customers are usually things that new customers will also want, and thus,
increase our sales. Perhaps we are a bit different, because we only sell
after long evaluation times, so the feature list isn't the only criterea for
our sales. We need to be genuinely usefull.
The only exception to this is consistancy issues. We may find a much better
way to do something, but it'll be diffrent from what our customers are used
for. In those cases we'll spend a lot of time and resources for giving them
a way to retain the behavior they are used to.

This isn't a promotion for our great customer support, its just another
prespective on the same issues.
I guess each company has its own prioritising algorithm :-)
So either get free software, or a company that takes its customers
seriously.

---

From: Gilad Ben-Yossef <[email-masked]>
Date: 15 Aug 2002 21:25:45 +0300

> So either get free software, or a company that takes its customers

Unfortunatly, companies like these are even rares then a working free
software based business model... :-)

Gilad.

-- 
Gilad Ben-Yossef <[email-masked]>
http://benyossef.com

"Money talks, bullshit walks and GNU awks."
  -- Shachar "Sun" Shemesh, debt collector for the GNU/Yakuza