AND WHAT A WEEK IT WAS . . .
When I took the reigns (as CEO) from the capable hands of Ben Smith, everyone internally and externally had the same question for me . . . Are you going to blog? It took me a week, but Im blogging!
So if it took me a week to start blogging, what the heck have I been doing you ask? I had three primary goals for my first week:
1. Get immersed in the technology - I spent much of the week asking poor, unsuspecting members of our development team to pick up a pen, get to the white board and start drawing. Getting grounded in how our products work from the bottom up (i.e. really understanding the architecture) gives me the context for everything I still need to learn about our business.
2. Talk to customers The highlight of my week was conducting two Community chats. I need to sync up with David I. and John K. on a plan to do this regularly. Im not accustom to having such a great forum for direct customer feedback, so I look forward to hosting chats fairly regularly.
3. Provide the CodeGear team visibility into my initial priorities . . . without scaring the hell out of them!
Ill tell you more in future blogs about all five of the themes I communicated to the team. However, Id like to share one of the five today that is extremely important to me . . . and that I need feedback on from the Community. As a company, I want to develop a core competency is something I call first experience. How I explained this to the CodeGear team is as follows. All too often, software companies define quality only in terms of code coverage and test metrics. Thats not where quality begins for the users of our products. Your first quality experience occurs when you attempt to order a product, register it, install it, etc. Too many companies dont think about quality in terms of the entire user experience. I know as an electronics consumer I get very annoyed when my first experience is poor. I discussed this concept with the team during our initial all hands meeting. Later in the week when I learned it often requires support personnel to help customers register our products, it was clear we have a long way to go. The good news is, everyone was pleased to hear this was one of my top priorities and are anxious to begin the journey. Now that Ive made it public, theres no turning back.
Id love to get feedback from folks in the Community on where we can improve your first experience. Feel free to post comments on my blog or send me email at jd@codegear.com.
Its going to take me awhile to get my blogging mojo. I dont have a definitive plan on how frequently Ill be in blog mode, but I will try to make it fairly frequent.
Im off to Beijing next week to meet with customers and our AsiaPac team. Allen Bauer just finished a death march across most of Asia for a variety of customer meetings, so look to his blog for highlights. Despite missing my wife and kids while Im on the road, I always look forward to getting out of the office to meet with customers. Look for China highlights in my next blog.
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Posted by Jim Douglas on April 10th, 2007 under Uncategorized |30 Responses to “AND WHAT A WEEK IT WAS . . .”
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April 10th, 2007 at 10:22 am
Great to see you posting!!
And, if theres anything I can do to help, half your team knows more ways to contact me than my parents do!
April 10th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Glad to hear news from you!
I hope you’ll be able to make CodeGear fly even higher. The first quarter they did really well…
Keep up the good work Jim! And good luck… (everybody needs it)
April 10th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Welcome to both CodeGear and blogging … I’m betting you’ll do very well at both.
Looking forward to where you’re taking the show. Starting out with the "first of the five" that you’ve outlined above is an excellent idea … let the managers get back to managing.
I expect you’ve heard of the b.p.d.non-technical newsgroup. As redundant as I expect it may well be, this recommendation is a really tough call … tough to recommend for the simple reason of maintaining your sanity, but tough not to recommend as the one true place where you’ll hear every [even remotely applicable] bitch about CodeGear.
Hope to see you around, I’ll be looking forward to more on your blog,
–
Dave
April 10th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Sounds like we’re stalking you Liz! You should be afraid . . .
Thanks for your kind words and I’m sure I’ll take you up on your offer. The software industry I came from (Electronic Design Automation) has a strong blogging tradition, but doesn’t have a blogging forum that enables effective communication with between software producers and users. Therefore, I look forward to learning how to using it effectively.
Jim
April 10th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Sergio . . .
Thanks for your comments and the "good luck." What’s that old corny saying "good luck is opportunity meets preparedness" . . . just give me the luck!
April 10th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
DaveK
Thanks for the lead on the b.p.d.non-technical newsgroup. It had not been brought to my attention yet . . . they must have been sparing me. I’ll definitely check it out. I’ve always found those forums to pretty useful if you have the patience to wade through the nasty snipes. All of people take the time to post good, critical feedback that should be taken seriously.
April 10th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
What about new channels, to open up a little bit to larger masses? Few examples… Why don’t you have Special Programs:
1. To rent the Delphi IDE by the day (don’t know, maybe $19.99/day…)
2. For universities (to get Delphi for internal use only, inside the school, for free)
3. For 3rd party partners (component and wizard vendors)
4. For Open Source developers (yes, you may have heard that 95% of open source software is actually Windows software!) - obviously, these folks could not afford to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for a commercial box.
5. Implementing a competitive pricing policy for different countries/geographical areas, fully synchronized with their budget.
6. For startups! Yes, that is… Startups should be allowed to use Delphi (or other famous Code Gear products) for free, of course, with the obligation of paying back, when they sell their products, of course, if they succeed..
PS
Pay attention to details… Many things are far from being what they seam… The equation you function is extremely complex and many times, the shiny things are not all shiny when you look inside… (just plated) - There are things which are not shiny but pure gold… (often plated with rust, but pure gold…) Remember these words and Welcome to CG!
Just my $0.02…
FB
April 10th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
What about new channels, to open up a little bit to larger masses? Few examples… Why don’t you have Special Programs:
1. To rent the Delphi IDE by the day (don’t know, maybe $19.99/day…)
2. For universities (to get Delphi for internal use only, inside the school, for free)
3. For 3rd party partners (component and wizard vendors)
4. For Open Source developers (yes, you may have heard that 95% of open source software is actually Windows software!) - obviously, these folks could not afford to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for a commercial box.
5. Implementing a competitive pricing policy for different countries/geographical areas, fully synchronized with their budget.
6. For startups! Yes, that is… Startups should be allowed to use Delphi (or other famous Code Gear products) for free, of course, with the obligation of paying back, when they sell their products, of course, if they succeed..
PS
Pay attention to details… Many things are far from being what they seam… The equation you function is extremely complex and many times, the shiny things are not all shiny when you look inside… (just plated) - There are things which are not shiny but pure gold… (often plated with rust, but pure gold…) Remember these words and Welcome to CG!
Just my $0.02…
FB
April 10th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Take a look to http://www.delphifeeds.com/
In one page you can see all the blogs that really matter to Delphi and delphi.non-technical news
dluyo
April 10th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
Welcome to the blogosphere and glad to see you’re starting with the right foot: I liked that 1 of 5 as it addresses one of the biggest problems that CG recently when rushing two products JIT to make it to 1st Quarter due to SOX/financial concerns…
There are so many concerns CG customers have about so many things, but I think you have the right people there to ask questions: Nick Hodges, for one, has been "taking a beat" in the newsgroups, standing by CG all the time, so he should be on your list as an "easy way through the newsgroups" as I’m sure he can let you know what concerns your customers are having, particularly on these last few weeks.
Wish you and CG best of luck even if I hope it doesn’t have to depend on luck but on what decisions are made.
April 10th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Re the "first experience"…
My team has Software Assurance, and we haven’t yet received Delphi 2007. D2k7 is supposed to be available via the new Electronic Software Delivery, but that doesn’t help us, because nobody’s provided us any information on how to download it. We’re told it’s being shipped, so presumably we’ll get boxes eventually, but until they get here we can’t join the others using D2k7.
Software Assurance customers are paying you a fair bit of money to stay on top of new products… it might be good if some attention was paid to actually getting those products to them.
April 10th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
FrankB makes an interesting point about post secondary. Delphi needs a LOT more of a push into the education system. Pascal has never gotten a good wrap there, but like so many things, hook them when they are young.
April 10th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
"Later in the week when I learned it often requires support personnel to help customers register our products.." Yes, make the registration less onerous and your first core competency will be much further along. There are many threads in the newsgroups regarding registration headaches.
April 11th, 2007 at 5:22 am
Three words describes your first blog entry:
1) Technology
2) Customers
3) Visibility
Great post. Best wishes. Go go go CG !!!!
April 11th, 2007 at 5:23 am
Three words describes your first blog entry:
1) Technology
2) Customers
3) Visibility
Great post. Best wishes. Go go go CG !!!!
April 11th, 2007 at 6:17 am
Jim,
Welcome aboard!
You’ve got a great team who’ve been held back for too long.
I would love to talk about my Delphi "first experience", but having gone through a due-diligence exercise where I was grilled about guaranteed availability of critical software, I have to say that the current Activation system, combined with the lack of a public plan for making licenses available in case of product EOL / company failure is hurting my chances of upgrading to the latest + greatest version. Lawyers can get quite worked up about such things, and, as a Director, I have an obligation to shareholders to provide adequate contingency plans in case of supplier change/failure.
As you have already found out, this system needs a lot of manual intervention / support. Surely a creative solution can be found that protects your IP without damaging customer interests?
Good luck for the future,
Ian
April 11th, 2007 at 6:17 am
It was interesting that you mentioned the order process as I found it quite frustrating that whilst in the States D2007 could be pre-ordered, it was only possible in the UK to pre-order literally a couple of days before D2007 was released. I sent an email regarding it and received a reply that I should contact someone else only to do so and never get a reply?Ken
April 11th, 2007 at 6:48 am
Jim:
Welcome to the community and good luck as CEO of CodeGear. We are all counting on you to take the company and the community out of the doldrums and into the trade winds of programming lore.
You are right. Its all about the customer experience and first impressions do make lasting impressions. Good start. Let’s see where you go with this.
A recommended battle cry for CodeGear: Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way because CodeGear is comming through. CodeGear should be the juggernaut for CodeWarriors. A little positive mental attitude does goes a long way, and when said with passion and vigor gets the troops highly motivated for battle.
Tom Martin
Delphi Centurion
http://delphicenturion.blogspot.com
April 11th, 2007 at 11:29 am
Hi Jim,
I just downloaded Turbo C++ 6.0 Express edition. It is surely different when it comes to VCL RAD. I am really fascinated with this development.
I’ve a suggestion, how it would be to include Boost library as default or made available as a plug-in to download. Now a days Boost has become a kind of standard C++, many would love to see it.
Also commercial or free IDE doesn’t include Boost Libraries in their distribution
April 11th, 2007 at 11:31 am
When you install, uninstall and install Delphi for PHP and get an "Invalid serial number" message during the registration process, this issue is noted by CodeGear as "AS DESIGNED".
"AS DESIGNED" doesn’t mean it’s good design. Has anyone tested the registration system at all? Did anyone?
April 11th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
"BAD DESIGNED"
April 12th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
Great to see you blogging. I also started a blog about Delphi. Hopefully this way I will be an active part of the community.
Looking forward to see more posts in your blog.
Robin
April 12th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
Hello Jim,
A few more ideas on how delphi can be made better
1. Documentation REALLY needs a lot of work. I purchased turbo pro recently, while delphi is a teriffic product, the bundled documentation is utterly useless.
2. Perhaps some of the well known delphi publications ( magazines/books) could be brought back into circulation. I am sure a lot of people would like this too.
3. Some more videos on using dephi, like the ones nick hodges has made. I thought they were useful..
regards
Sriram
April 13th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
The challenge for you Mr Douglas will be to restore faith with existing customers first. No amount of parading around and strutting your marketing stuff like a beautiful osteritch is going to make one iota of difference. The moment BDS2006 is mentioned. the company’s head disappears in the sand and all it presents is bare arse. When BDS2006 works properly , then I will look at 2007, not before.
April 13th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
Souns like someone who understands it! Nice to have you a board.
April 18th, 2007 at 12:47 am
I have to say that Mr. Douglas backs up what he says here. I was having a bit of an issue and getting nowhere with a couple of people I was trying to contact. After a week I finally got fed up and e-mailed Mr. Douglas and within a few minutes people were contacting me and the problem got solved immediately.
I am looking forward to CodeGear under the the direction of Mr. Douglas. I have used Mr. Douglas instead of ‘Jim’ because at this point, I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Douglas.
Mr. Douglas, keep up the good work!
Jim Hunter
April 21st, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Hi Jim:
How about starting a R&D centre in Bangalore India. That would be really good to tap the good talent here in india.
April 22nd, 2007 at 7:51 am
Mr. Douglas,Codegear is on wrong track of it’s future. I’d like to see you can attach importance to .NET.
May 13th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
"First experience" is indeed important. May I also suggest that you appoint somebody to monitor and oversee the "day to day" usability of your IDEs? It is sad when new versions have more "day to day" issues than previous ones, and its something that sorely needs recifying. I’ll list some annoyances below as examples to get the "IDE quality manager" started, and say that I sooooo wish some of these could disappear in a soon-to-be released D2007 update.
- Pressing and releasing the ALT key often does NOT activate the menu,
leading instead to unintended changes in source or object inspector. Been
there since at least D7.
- Pressing Ctrl+Enter on units or include files that are not listed in the
.dpr file now brings up file dialog.
- In several of my projects, after stopping on a breakpoint, I always get a
"source has changed" dialog when I want to continue running even if I have
not touched anything.
- It is ridiculous that the IDE is locked up for a minute or more when
pressing F1 while waiting for the help to actually appear.
(Amusingly, I pressed F1 on "procedure". It opens some item not related to
pascal at all. I wonder how many Delphi users have used the "Document
Feedback" option to tell Microsoft how the Delphi help performs…)
- F11/F12 does not consistently switch between form, source, and object
inspector
- The IDE’s "current directory" does not change when switching projects.
After switching from one project to another, doing Ctrl+Enter on a unit that
exists in both projects opens the unit from the previously opened project.
- Frequently, if I try to Ctrl+Enter on a unitname right after opening a
project, I’ll get a "file locked by another process" error message. What is
it in the IDE that locks files from opening?
June 3rd, 2008 at 1:10 am
Good Day Jim,
My name is Pieter Viljoen. I am an Information System Methodologist, and my Company, Infomet has been using Borland products over many many years for the developer of all our tools and Software, needless to say I have been a very loyal supporter of the products of Borland.
You recently made a statement on your Blog: “.. our first quality experience occurs when you attempt to order a product, register it, install it, etc.”
I want to share with you my experience of doing business with your company, and maybe from this, you will get a little bit of insight of just how hard or impossible it is to actually do business with CodeGear, and just maybe you would want to fix that. So please bear with me.
First let me say that we buy all of our components over the internet.
• We have a subscription with Developer Express, we renew our fees annually, get notified of updates, and downloads and installations work totally hassel free.
• We do the same with TMSSoftware, Steema, and purchase from many others. i.e. IntraWeb, Axolot, All Around Automation, TRichView, etc.
• Some of these component vendors handle the on-line orders themselves, others direct their on-line purchased through Share*It, Digital River etc.
• Most of these are available immediately for download, some take 24 hours to verify the payment.
• In ALL these cases we have never experienced a problem.
Now, you would think that if would be that simple to get the a new version of Delphi.
• Well, initially all Borland products could be bought off the shelf of the local computer supermart – no longer.
• We could never do it on the old Borland Site, always had to buy a copy while travelling overseas.
• Eventually CodeGear appears. This was great news, it finally had an on-line store.
• Since August 2007, We have been trying to purchase a copy of the new Delphi RAD Studio 2007 which includes the Win32 version, as well as Delphi for PHP.
• The on-line store simply states that it cannot not process the transaction.
• The credit card information was verified carefully – no problem there.
• We then tried to buy through the US stores, Codegear’s US store does not allow on-line purchases from South Africa.
• Then we tried buying in through some store in EMEA, since we do not have an on-line store here.
• The one from UK, Ireland finally accepts the order and charges the credit card (1760 pounds), but here is the amazing events that follow.
• Confirmation email is received from Digital River
• The links to download, do not work. They start up, appear to work, then stop.
• After 5 retries, the site denies any further downloads, stating that the limit of 5 attempts has been exceeded.
• Contacting the designated email address customersupport@digitalrivier.com only returns a failed email message after a few days.
• Contacting the designated email addresses on the CodeGear site, do exactly the same. 2 addresses do not respond, the other 3 on the CodeGear site are actually invalid.
• At that point I really started getting frustrated. “FindMyOder” cannot locate my order, so I log a case with CodeGear at 3 places on the Web Site. To these cases, I receive no response, only an automated acknowledgement that the case have been logged.
• I locate another email address for Digital Research and they send me an affidavit to fill out for a fraudulent transaction which has to be printed and sworn to in front of a public notary.
• I also report a case of fraud at the police station as well as with the VISA card company.
In all of this, I have not had one CodeGear customer support person contacting me nor from Digital River. No one cares .. yet my Credit Card had been charged.
So, we reason, in the mean time we could work with a trial version right? Well try downloading the trial. Once downloaded (5mb) it seems to need more components which it cannot find and wants to connect to the web. Once connected to the web, it still cannot find the components. So we notice that there is actually a full version consisting of 2 ISO files, one 4GB and the other 1.7GB a wopping 5.7GB that must be downloaded over the internet before one can install it, and that does not even cover the massive updates of almost another 1GB that have to be applied to bring it up to date after installation.
Maybe it was a fraudulent transaction, maybe it is a flawed process or software bug. But in the end Codegear has to resolve these issues to the satisfaction of its clients. Is no-one attending to these questions:
• Was our order received by Codegear,
• Was it paid for, and was payment received by Codegear.
• Was delivery made, and did the customer actually receive the goods.
• If there is an issue, who is attending to it and fixing it.
To the point you made on your Blog, these are issues just in the “buy it and install it” stages.
Apart from this issue, numerous inputs and requests to Borland in the past have just been blatantly ignored, leaving the impression of an organization that is scattered, could not care less and have become leaderless.
We were so happy about the fact that Codegear was getting a fresh start away from Borland. In the final instance, our conclusion is that it is impossible to do business with Codegear.
We are still without our Delphi RAD Studio, and without our 1700 pounds.
I no longer wonder why such a talented company like Borland could not make it, first I thought it was only the BORLAND management, now I know better.
In the time that it took to try and resolve these issues, some of the technical guys have downloaded Visual Studio for DotNet, Dev Express and related components, they don’t like it but we have no choice if they cannot get the product.
With the internet, customer (dis)loyalty is only a click away.
Thank you for listening!