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> TechComm Dood wrote:
>
> >General point: It's good to keep the audience in mind,
> >as long as you remember that no one specific person's
> >requirements are "right" or "gold"... you're designing
> >for a profile or a collection of users, and therefore
> >"advocacy" must involve analysis, judgement calls, and
> >many grains of salt. ;-)
>
> I thought that went without saying ...
It's a common corporate mentality, no question. And, of course, anyone working
in the corporate world should be aware of it, especially if they're in a junior
position.
However, I think that it's well over-due for questioning.
As someone who uses less and less proprietary software with every passing month,
one thing that always strikes me when I do use it is how much its manufacturers
expect users to conform their expectations. In the free software world, much
greater attention is given to appealing to as many users as possible. Of course,
there has to be some limit for the software to work at all, but there is a much
higher degree of customization and often several ways to accomplish the same goal.
Considering that many categories of software have reached the stage where they
have little new to offer customers, it wouldn't be a bad idea for corporations
to pay the same attention to individual user's demand. This attention is about
all that is left to offer as an incentive to upgrade. It also fits in well with
the idea of business as a conversation, with more of a two way exchange between
businesses and their customers.
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