1Re: What do users REALLY want?0

["William D. Gooch" <ai.gooch@MCC.COM>]

    Date: Fri, 5 Jan 90 13:45:50 CST
    From: "BUCKMAN%ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com"%ALAN.kahuna.DECNET.LOCKHEED.COM@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM

    While I'm flaming........ what's the story on Symbolics coming out with great
    new technical products, but not following up on them.  It looks to me like:
    Dynamic Windows, Concordia, and Statice were NEVER finished.  For instance:
    Dynamic Windows (specifically incremental redisplay) has caused us to waste an
    endless amount of time. My guess is that support for that product has stopped in
    favor of CLIM (I hope that's true, because we've heavily based our software on
    the presentation system etc. and have a lot invested in the expectation that
    that software work well.) I see a second implementation of the software
    (CLIM) being our only hope for getting a clean, non buggy version of that sort
    of capability.

In a sense you are more correct than you may know, since the folks
working on CLIM at ILA were some of the key implementors of DW.  I think
though that this apparent "evolution" toward CLIM is more of an accident
than a strategy.  Symbolics really bit off a little more than it could
chew when DW was released (prematurely, some would say), and this was at
a particularly inopportune time in terms of their subsequent problems
with profitability and hence the unavailability of resources to fix the
problems.  They might have overreached themselves even had everything
gone well (many users have complained about the extent and nature of
incompatible changes in every major release prior to the upcoming one -
it would appear however that they've now learned to do better).