On Sat, 04 Dec 2004 10:58:41 -0800, Greg Connor wrote:
I think that the issue of
whether people would like a tool that does one job only, vs. one that does
multiple related jobs for little incremental cost, is more of a marketing
issue anyway.
If you think it is strictly a marketing issue, then I haven't explained thing
adequately.
I tried to put the issues in terms of development, adoption, administration and
use. Some of this can classed as "marketing" since an important part of
gaining adoption is getting people to understand the mechanism and see the
benefit. (Marketing is much more than simply coercive "selling".)
But difficulties with development, administration and use go far beyond
marketing. Usability is a term often used, though I think it mostly used on
the end-user side, but usually not on the operations side.
Interoperability means that people have to want to make things work and they
have to be able to. The human factors of this means that the cost/benefit
issues need to be crystal clear and the ability to effect those benefits needs
to be highly predictable. Difficulties such as confusion about what is
available in the current service, versus what is merely being discussed,
defeats this goal. So does difficulty in knowing how to configure things.
All of this is considerably different than "marketing".
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
+1.408.246.8253
dcrocker a t ...
www.brandenburg.com