Re: So long Raining Data. Hello TigerLogic Corporation.

On Apr 19, 3:41 pm, Tony Gravagno
<address.is.in.po...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
dawn wrote:
I just heard a
talk (at DEVCON) by a marketing person who had helped turn around a
software company by having them remove the term "search" from any
descriptions of their product.  Everyone knows who owns the search
market.

Hmmm, this reminds me of MySpace.  It has basic features with a lousy
implementation, lots of bugs, and it's mis-used and abused by a large
segment of its audience who doesn't know or care much about software
quality.  There's lots of room for improvement there, providing better
value without making it more complicated.

The traditional search engine is actually pretty poor at delivering
what we "want" from a couple basic search terms.  How efficient is it
to type in a couple words and get a few million hits from which to
choose?  I consider myself a fairly savvy search-nik, using all of the
advanced features to filter down to pages of interest.  But when I get
down to the final result set it's still obvious to me which pages
aren't remotely related to what I really want.  What's lacking is
context, the ability to separate text-oriented pages that include a
sequence of ASCII characters from data sources that have information
about a topic of interest.  These are vastly different concepts and
obviously a cut above typing a word and clicking "I feel lucky".

I have no idea what ChunkIt does, but if it's a step closer to the
"semantic web" than what's available today then I will be very
interested in their progress.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web)
I only hope they get/have some marketing savvy to explain the product
well and position it properly for its intended audience.  This is an
area where they have failed dismally in the past - and no product will
survive poor marketing no matter how great it is.

THAT a product has an angle on search is well and good. That they
MARKET under that term is where the point was being made. The
marketing expert helped change the positioning of the product he was
discussing, while changing no features whatsoever. It was a point I
would not have come up with myself, so it made quite an impression. I
would have thought that since "search" is something people understand,
it would make sense to use such a term and then compare what they know
to how you can do things better. However, I can understand now,
especially given the data that backed up his point, that deciding to
use the same terminology as the company that has almost cornered the
market and certainly cornered the mindshare related to that term is a
bad plan.

Also, they were very clear that customers who use their Pick products
were not in their target audience for the TigerLogic product line.

I don't think that's a line to discourage a Pick shop from using their
other products, but to discourage a Pick shop from thinking this is
yet another Pick product that has an MD, BASIC, and multivalues.

I think my sense of the situation was on target -- they really didn't
want to work with a company that was looking for "bang for the buck"
and they especially did not want to work with a prospective company
that was less than huge, even if it had a growth plan. Even in their
sales they had no vision, just next-quarter reporting pragmatics, it
seemed -- very short-sighted. It would not be my style to push out my
only customer base, the only community from which my company currently
received revenue, in favor of potential rainmakers (and from what Gil
said, those have not exactly come through). So, perhaps my concerns
about it are simply that it doesn't seem like the kind of company that
I would want to do business with, whether or not it is able to become
highly profitable, something that I still don't read in any tea leaves
I can see.

 If a
site truly has a need for whatever a company offers I don't think
they'd discourage the enquiry.

Well, that's precisely what I think they did, even after agreeing that
the planned software was completely aligned with their solution.

So, again, it seems they are a company wanting to leave their current
customer base behind, except to the extent that it will pay annually
for their non-strategic product line.

Well, in some ways I can't blame them.
- They add features that people don't use.

And that is the fault of their customers? Pa-lease. We all add some
features that our users don't use, but that is often because we do not
assess the situation adequately. Isn't it likely that our users are
not using a feature because the easier or better choice for the user
is not to use it? We have to take that feature all the way from
"usable" to highly desirable, so that the obviously better choice, the
one with the least pain associated with it, is to go with our
feature. Typically a feature must remove some current pain, not just
add some joy, before someone will change. This is a particular
challenge when your users are developers. For example, whenever a
company adds features that are intended to make end-end-users happy,
if it adds to the burden of developers, including added concerns
related to the -ilities, it is not all that likely to get adopted.

- People petition them to add features that can easily be coded in the
field.

Sometimes that makes a lot of sense. If I know that what I want to do
is exactly what most other customers of a product will want to do,
then I will petition the vendor, even if I could write it myself.
Additionaly, if you think that the vendor might be asked by others for
the feature, you might not want to write your own only to find that it
is incompatible with the standard vendor offering in a year, so it
might make sense to at least inquire whether the vendor is considering
such a feature.

- People complain about functionality that hasn't changed or bothered
anyone for a decade, yet somehow all of a sudden it's an industry
shaking show stopper.

Solutions and happy customers are not all about features. Feature
requests have all kinds of motivations, and satisfying the customer
when they make a request has many facets as well. Implementing the
requested feature is often a small part of satisfying the customer.
The customer might be more satisfied if the feature is not
implemented, but they "feel" that the company is visionary and will
bend over backwards to help them be successful in other ways, but are
able to verbalize why this particular feature request is not a
priority for them right now. That said, when I say I want something,
I really do. Now. ;-)

- They can't approach SOA like IBM does for the U2 community because
most of the D3 user base wouldn't have a clue what they're talking
about.

I would hope they would not be so patronizing ;-) IBM and
InterSystems can write good software to do current tasks by channeling
their energy into such things, by having a vision and direction, by
showing industry leadership. TigerLogic (aka RD) has been channeling
vast resources and whatever vision they have into the TL product. It
seems from this outsider's perspective that they have provided no
leadership nor vision within the MV community for as long as I have
been an interested MV observer (~2001 and following). Another way to
think about it is to ask whether they have sucked energy from their
customer base and the greater MV community more than they have helped
to energize it. From where I sit, they are an energy-sucker, not an
energy-giver. I could be way off on this, however, Tony. I'll grant
that I am far from the epicenter. It makes sense that from my
distance I would have a different perspective than you. Yours takes
into account much more information and more detailed insight, so it
might very well be more accurate. Mine might be more impartial,
however, as I know no one who works at RD/TL and have little
connection, including historical or geographical, to the company. I
am merely an interested observer and have been, on occasion, a
prospective customer, with a little bit of "industry researcher"
tossed in.

People hang with D3 because it's functionally stable for their
purposes.  Many sites only came to D3 because they were dragged from
AP and R83 before that.  It's a market that has been pulled to the
current release, compared to other MV DBMS companies where the user
base and market requirements tend to drive development.  In many ways
D3 engineers aren't any more progressive than their user base - it's
sort of a match.  

That might be the case now, but perhaps that is because so many
customers have moved on to other platforms, RDBMS or MV, over the past
decade?

It's not an inherent limitation of the engineers
themselves or of D3 users either.  I just think people in general tend
to look at D3 and just don't want or expect much change, so we don't
get it.  There is a major disconnect between market demand and
improved revenue that results from product investment.  Over time this
is perceived as product and even stagnation.  So again, in some ways I
can't blame them.

It looks like there have been
enough changes that I should update that MV Family tree at some point,
but it won't be this year.  cheers!  --dawn

So far, I think as far as MV goes the only thing that has changed the
name in our vendor files.  I don't think the TigerLogic XDMS or
ChunkIt belong in the MV tree any more than Cognos, or DB2 - these are
peripheral offerings by companies that happen to also offer MV
products.

Yes, agreed. TigerLogic might have started with a Pick engine, much
as Ascential Data Stage started with UniVerse. But as far as changes
to the family tree, Ladybridge should have a more prominent spot;
InterSystems should be added; there have been changes in the ownership
of Reality and some changes related to jBASE too IIRC. I'm not sure
what happened to Univision (EDP) -- is that still sold as a database
product in the US? And now there is a name change for Raining Data.
Those are the types of changes I was thinking about. cheers! --dawn


T

.

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