Jeremy's Blog

Even vague ones … and I mean really vague.

Quite a while ago, Omega Vortex adopted a policy that we would refrain from announcing specific release dates. We won’t even narrow it down to a month for you. There’s quite a few reasons that we do this.

We’re a startup that’s bootstrapping from consulting work. At any given time, said consulting work currently takes priority over all other things, because we have to make money in order to pay bills and keep developers paid. That’s all fine and dandy, but while we’re having to focus so much on consulting, software isn’t being written. This is eating us like the plague. We’re presently amazingly profitable, but not in the way that we want to be. No matter how good our scheduling is, it doesn’t make a difference because we’re constantly having to drop everything to invest time in a new consulting project.

On the plus side, we’re about to simultaneously release a new product that hasn’t been announced yet along with updates to two other products that you may already be familiar with. No matter how close we get to that day, we’re not going to tell you when that day will be, in advance. All of our releases are marked by quarters. Any one year is divided up into three month quarters. Q1 is January – March, Q2 is April – June, Q3 is July – September, and Q4 is October – December. That means that when we mark a release as Q3 of 2008, we could potentially release that product at any point within those three months. If we’re expecting to release in September, we’ll actually really say Q4 so that we have three extra months worth of time buffer to use in the even that something goes wrong. If we happen to meet our goal of September, we just managed to release an entire month early.

Three months of buffer is a pretty decent amount of time. Sadly, because of time constraints with our consulting work, we’re still having trouble meeting those release dates. OmegaVerge has suffered considerably because of this and it has allowed competitors to get a jump on us. (Speaking of OmegaVerge, I’d like to give a shoutout to Ben Babcock who actually managed to help me with a SimpleXML issue by letting me help him with a SimpleXML issue. We now have type-safety/inference of IP.Converge methods in OmegaVerge since we solved that issue, instead of having to pass around SimpleXMLElement objects. Thanks, Ben.)

If you’re a software development shop and, like us, you can’t dedicate 100% of your time to software development, don’t announce release dates. Even vague ones. Surprise people. People get incredibly antsy / angry when you don’t meet release dates.

Oh, and if you have a historic trend of lack of ability to execute, don’t try to say things like “this summer” or “next month” … I’m guilty of this too, but this is a practice that really needs to stop. I’ve seen so many projects say “next month” and it take so much longer than that. Two in particular have me facepalming, right now …