Buckman on SLUG: What do users REALLY want?

["Robert S. Kirk" <rsk%samson.cadr.dialnet.symbolics.com@RELAY.CS.NET>]

    Date: Fri, 12 Jan 90 15:13:18 CST
    From: "BUCKMAN%ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com"%ALAN.kahuna.DECNET.LOCKHEED.COM@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM
    Date: Fri, 12 Jan 90 13:09 PST
    From: Eric Buckman <BUCKMAN@ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com>
	Date: Thu, 11-Jan-90 22:12:54-PST
	Date: Thu, 11 Jan 90 17:18 EST
	From: Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (David A. Moon)
	    Date: Fri, 5 Jan 90 11:41 PST
	    From: Eric Buckman <BUCKMAN@ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com>
	    Are all these comments / suggestions on what Symbolics should or shouldn't do
	    really worth anything, or are we as users just talking among ourselves.
	    ....


	I'd like to comment on this, as an individual who cares about the user
	community, not as any kind of official statement from Symbolics.

	A lot of times people make comments on SLUG and feel like they might be
	ignored because ....
	I know for a fact that several people in the Symbolics marketing
	department receive the SLUG mailing list and read most of the messages
	carefully.  The same is true of most of the technical leaders in the
	company.

I have a hard time understanding why everyone who works at Symbolics and
who has e-mail access does not receive SLUG mail.  Do they have a choice
and elect not too?  Don't they know about it?  Or are they restricted
from seeing it?

Some time ago I was quite puzzled when our local service people were (or
claimed) ignorance of the IFU hardware problems and we had to print out
all the SLUG mail on the subject for them so they could see that other
customers were having the same problem.

It would seem that SLUG mail provides some very powerful feedback that
all developers in Symbolics should be aware of, even if they elect to
gloss over it.

 
	    .....  Coming from a lab that develops software for those
	    application groups, we have so far been very pleased with the power that
	    Symbolics provides, both in terms of their development environment (where we can
	    turnaround applications a lot faster, and with a much much lower head
	    count, than other groups working on other platforms/languages.  Some of this
	    success can be attributed to using Symbolics software as pre-written code.  i.e.
	    Building up from Concordia to create a  hypertext based help system for an
	    application, or using Statice as the substrate on which to build database
	    applications.  

	I'm glad to hear that.  Making people like you a lot more productive in what you
	do was always the big idea behind Symbolics.  I admit that in the past not all
	elements in Symbolics understood that; some people used to think the big idea
	was to make minicomputers that would put DEC out of business.

Gee wiz, are you saying Symbolics is a CASE company?!  I can never seem
to get your sales and marketing people to admit it -- but I'm at a loss
to provide any other (honest) description of what LispMs all about.  And
while Symbolics sits around trying to figure out what market its in, the
rest of the world is busy duplicating Symbolics' functionality and
calling it CASE!  Its not a nice feeling to watch this happening.


    Right.  Keep up the excellent work, and I'll keep up my effort to bring
    "Symbolics" technology into the software development and delivery effort here at
    Lockheed.


Ditto!