Lms 7.8?

[mherger]

> i have to say, that while i appreciate your honesty, this is the worst
> possible response b/c it just goes to show you guys ignore feedback.

I know it's a waste of time to even type this if it were only for you,
MrSinatra. But it's more for other visitors than you...

As we both know you will never accept what I say and you don't like. Thus
there's no need to try to explain. But here I go anyway:

We do care. But bugzilla is only one way to give us feedback. Support is
another one. That survey I mentioned yet one more. And as bugzilla by far
is the most geeky way to submit wishes and issue reports to any company,
this is only one way of input which is taken into account when new
development is planned.

This doesn't mean it's useless. But it's not all that counts.

> secondly, its nonsense to disregard votes.

Agreed. That's why we sort our bug reviews by votes every know and then.
You don't have to believe me. I don't expect you to do so.

> wow, wonderful. number 1, support has nothing to do with certain bugs
> or enhancements. people aren't going to call support over bug 142 for
> instance, which you call one of the oldest and most popular bugs.

Users aren't going to google the internet to figure out there is such a
thing as bugzilla for Squeezebox feature requests.

I'm sorry you're always so depressed and frustrated by whatever I type and
do. Maybe you should put me on your blacklist and simply ignore me.

--

Michael

[MrSinatra]

making it personal when i said NOTHING of a personal nature is immature, and deflects the actual points i was making that are valid and strictly business. please, keep it on topic, don't obfuscate.

i have nothing against you, i appreciate the responses believe it or not. i know you don't feel likewise, but so be it.

in any case, i'm not alone in feeling like you guys aren't taking cues from bugs, forums posts, whatever. you can't have it both ways, meaning u can't in one breath say bugs and votes matter, then say they don't. surely you see the inherent contradictions in your own statements?

to me, the proof is in the pudding, or in this case, actions. bugs like 142 or 15604 or a handful of others have a lot of votes, yet they are ignored. if u guys would commit to even doing just ONE highly voted bug per release, i think you would not only see a huge sea change in peoples attitudes, but you would encourage a lot more voting (and therefore a more relevant sample size) in the process.

but in order for that to happen, u guys need to commit to that and then deliver. so thats the question to u i pose:

will you guys commit to implementing at least ONE top ten voted bug per official release going forward?

i think its a fair question.

[mherger]

> in any case, i'm not alone in feeling like you guys aren't taking cues

Please define "you guys".

It has been stated over and over again: this is a community forum. If you want to complain to Logitech, go to forums.logitech.com.

Some stupid guys like me try to bridge the two worlds. But you make the experience more than frustrating at times. We're the good guys. Without us this forum would have been closed years ago. As well as the wiki. And bugzilla. Think about it.

--

Michael

[MrC]

There's nothing problematic or personal in Michael H's response. In my opinion, his response (and responses in general) are exceptionally poised, considerate, and respectful.

I'm sure someday you'll see that.

[MrSinatra]

> in any case, i'm not alone in feeling like you guys aren't taking cues

Please define "you guys".

It has been stated over and over again: this is a community forum. If you want to complain to Logitech, go to forums.logitech.com.

Some stupid guys like me try to bridge the two worlds. But you make the experience more than frustrating at times. We're the good guys. Without us this forum would have been closed years ago. As well as the wiki. And bugzilla. Think about it.
--
Michael

i'm not attacking you personally, and without us you guys wouldn't have jobs doing this stuff. 'you guys' to me = anyone who is connected to creating this stuff.

and you dodged my question:

will you guys commit to implementing at least ONE top ten voted bug per official release going forward?

[erland]

Guys, please stop before this thread goes completely out of hand, we need to consider a few things.

1.
Without Michael, Andy and the other old Slim Devices employees the Squeezebox product wouldn't exist today, they have not only spend their working hours on this product they have also been visible on the forum more or less 365 days of the year, day and night. As Michael says, they are the good guys. And for Michael, most of us really appreciate all your hard work and the fact that you keep fighting for these products. I personally also appreciate that you dare to say the things you've said earlier in this thread, even though you know it might make some people upset because they interpret it the wrong way.


2.
There are other factors than geeky community members like most of us on these forums to consider when deciding what to to include in the next product release, for example:
- Problems which users calls Logitech support regarding costs money for Logitech support organization and due to this they are important.
- Features that are able to sell more Squeezeboxes are important because it makes the Squeezebox not just a successful product but also a product which gives Logitech something back economically.

It might be boring to think in economical terms, but those are still the ones that controls most companies in the world we live in. In any professional company products that makes a good economical result stays and products that don't will disappear.


3.
However, it's not possible to use support organization for getting ideas of most wanted new features or changes in functionality, because people don't call support for these kind of things. It might be possible to use the review forms from new users to get some ideas but it's important to understand that most of these users haven't understood what the product is all about yet, they have just started their Squeezebox journey and might not have realized what's important on longer terms yet. Some issues are only an issue during the first month and after that you realize that you can work your way around it and even though correcting such issue will make the first month more enjoyable it's not these kind of things that sells more Squeezeboxes. On the other hand, long term users like most of us tends to have problems to think outside the box, we can sometimes be stuck in old principles and don't see new ways of handling things, this also applies to long term employees by the way.

I think the important new features has to come from other sources, like:
- From long term users which understands the product, but is able to think outside the box
- From creative employees and/or third party developers who understands the needs

The issue is that it's not possible to use "votes" in bugzilla for this because a vote is just a vote and you have no idea why people have voted on something and you have no idea if they have actually fully understood the consequences before voting. It's also hard to use the public forum for things like this because sometimes you can't say what you want because someone who aren't understanding the context might see it and will interpret it the wrong way and threads will turn completely off topic and end up in endless discussions about things that aren't important.

The forum sections which have been used during some hardware beta testing where all people with access also have signed a NDA was a place where things like this could be discussed, but unfortunately I believe that kind of interaction no longer exist between Logitech and this community. I personally still believe something like this would be a good way to get good feedback, but anything that involves a NDA doesn't work unless the management people also understand and likes the idea.

So the result is that for the last years all focus have been on point 2, decreasing costs and implementing basic new features which are easy to advertize. However, while being easy to advertize, most of these features doesn't really turn into usable features which makes you recommend the Squeezebox to a friend.

I'm talking about the fact that most new stuff like premium services, iOS/Android apps, facebook integration, Revue integrating tends to be implemented to a basic level so they can be advertized on the box but then nobody is continuing the development to make the features useful, so people use them as an argument to recommend the Squeezebox to friends.

Maybe I've missed things, but to me it feels like (with the exception of critical bug corrections):
- Facebook integration is basically the same as it was in the first release it was introduced.
- Spotify integration is basically the same as it was in the first release it was introduced.
- iOS/Android Logitech apps is basically the same as they was in the first release they were introcuded.
- Image/Video/UPnP support is basically the same as it was in the first release it was introduced. Of course, it was introduced in 7.7, so maybe Logitech will prove me wrong and do a lot of enhancements in this area in 7.8, but probably not since the only reason they made it was to sell more Revue's which they later decided to abandon completely.

I guess what I would like to see is that Logitech continue to develop features they've already added and not just abandon them as soon as they have enough to put a sticker on the box.

Regarding anything related to browsing or ratings/smart playlists, I've just given up, I would be extremely surprised if Logitech would put any focus in this area, because it's something that would make people recommend the product but it's not something that's easy to advertize, so it's not in line with what their strategy seems to be.

[reniera]

> And the larger fraction live with the bugs and or don't know how to
> file a bug report or vote on one.

They can get in touch with support. Support probably can't help, but they
would raise issues if they got repeated complaints about the same problem.

--

Michael

You don't call support for that. improvement requests are not problems. That information, you can get it from here. For free. But noone seems to care at logitech. The issue is that this forum is run by techies. Hopefully someone from marketing or product management will start reading this forum before a competing product arrives on the market.

[bluegaspode]

and you dodged my question:

will you guys commit to implementing at least ONE top ten voted bug per official release going forward?

You won't ever find a company that commits to anything like that.

So for me a statement like

>>do you guys care about votes or no?
We do. Probably not at the level some might want us to care, but still. "

is good enough.
It shows that people still care which matters a lot in big companies and which gives me hope (on the long run).

And come on: it won't ever matter how many votes bug 15604 will get. It's a highly debatable bug report: making UI more versatile vs. more clumsy to new users so it will always be up to a product manager what he personally prefers and if it matches his vision of the product.
This has nothing todo with ignoring votes altogether

[MrSinatra]

Erland,

you say votes and forums etc are no good for the devs to take cues from... so just how then do you propose they do it? u make some valid points but you seem to have a defeatist attitude. i don't mean that in a personal way, but when you say "you've given up" etc it seems that way. they used to ENCOURAGE VOTING, like Chris Owens, logitech employee, remember him??? now thats no good?

i haven't given up in the sense that i do think a reasonable, non-personal argument can be made that the devs, who btw WORK FOR LOGITECH, (i don't accept this deflection argument of good guys vs bad guys, which is insane in a corporate environment, you all are one entity imo), should takes cues to the roadmap from votes for bug tracker. how is that not reasonable? michael says they do, but when u have a bug like 142 sit DEAD for as long as it does, how can anyone believe that?

frankly, it seems to me it is completely reasonable to suggest that they could implement ONE top ten voted bug per official release.

You won't ever find a company that commits to anything like that.

So for me a statement like

is good enough.
It shows that people still care which matters a lot in big companies and which gives me hope (on the long run).

well, we disagree. i think its completely reasonable. and THEY encouraged it, don't forget that. the posts of them doing so are right in these very forums.

And come on: it won't ever matter how many votes bug 15604 will get. It's a highly debatable bug report: making UI more versatile vs. more clumsy to new users so it will always be up to a product manager what he personally prefers and if it matches his vision of the product.
This has nothing todo with ignoring votes altogether

this has nothing to do with 15604, that was just an example, just as 142 is an example.

http://bugs.slimdevices.com/buglist...._status=CLOSED

take your pick there of the highest voted bugs. ANY of the 11 open ones would be fine by me. do one a release. is that really impossible?

[erland]

you say votes and forums etc are no good for the devs to take cues from... so just how then do you propose they do it? u make some valid points but you seem to have a defeatist attitude. i don't mean that in a personal way, but when you say "you've given up" etc it seems that way. they used to ENCOURAGE VOTING, like Chris Owens, logitech employee, remember him??? now thats no good?

I think votes is a good way for people to tell Logitech what they wish to be implemented, so people should vote and Logitech does include votes as one factor when they consider if something should be implemented.

But I don't think you can trust votes strictly as long as it's as hard as it currently is to vote, you need to register a separate account and you need to find the bug among the thousands of bugs available in bugzilla. The reason some bugs have more votes than others are often that they have been promoted by someone in the forum to make people realize the bug exist and is possible to vote on. Also, I would suspect that it's probably less than 5% of the Squeezebox owners that spend time on this forum on weekly basis and of those 5% only a small sub set is registered in bugzilla so they can vote on bug reports and enhancement requests. It's easy to think that all Squeezebox owners read this forum every week because most of the experienced community members do, but in reality this isn't the case. Also there are probably a lot of users that doesn't even have a forum account but still reads the forum without being registered on it.

i haven't given up in the sense that i do think a reasonable, non-personal argument can be made that the devs, who btw WORK FOR LOGITECH, (i don't accept this deflection argument of good guys vs bad guys, which is insane in a corporate environment, you all are one entity imo), should takes cues to the roadmap from votes for bug tracker. how is that not reasonable? michael says they do, but when u have a bug like 142 sit DEAD for as long as it does, how can anyone believe that?

142 is not a bug, it's an enhancement request.

It's pretty obvious that Logitech and Slim Devices have decided to stay away from smart playlists and this also makes ratings completely uninteresting as their primary usage is together with smart playlists. In my mind, both 142 and 380 needs to be implemented to get something that's useful, else they will still have a dependency to third party solutions.

I've probably caused this scenario partly myself since the need become less obvious when there was a working third party solution through TrackStat/SQLPlaylist in 2006. Maybe it would have gotten higher priority if I hadn't released TrackStat/SQL Playlist, I don't know, but the main reason I released them was because I wanted to show the potential and I wanted the functionality myself and didn't want to wait for Slim Devices to realize it was important.

frankly, it seems to me it is completely reasonable to suggest that they could implement ONE top ten voted bug per official release.

Reasonable, yes, but you won't get any commitment, in same way as you won't get any commitment from Apple, Microsoft, Sonos, Google or any other serious company regarding new features.

What you will get is what Michael already has said, they will consider the votes when deciding what to include.

The reason enhancements like 142 hasn't been implemented is strategically, it's not because they don't care about votes, the same thing is also the reason for the top most voted feature regarding Grooveshark (which is related to legal issues). I would guess that most of the bugs/features on the top 10 list have a reason why they haven't been implemented, either it's not in line with Logitech strategies or they have negative side effects for some user category or they require a large development effort but won't generate enough revenue. Personally I would prefer that Logitech just closed enhancements they don't plan to fix with a "Won't fix" resolution, because that would make it clear for everyone what the strategy is, but in reality I understand why they don't want to do that because it will make some people upset when someone says that their favorite bug/enhancement won't be fixed, it causes less critique if they just ignore it. Target Milestone = "Future" or "New Schema" does in reality mean the same thing as "Won't fix" in most cases, at least in my mind.

As a side note, the Spotify enhancement request got exactly 100 votes and that one got implemented, so did a number of other bugs which also have a lot of votes:
http://bugs.slimdevices.com/buglist....solution=FIXED
So I guess this could be an indication that they do care about votes.