Over at Grumpy Storage, there’s currently a fantastic piece about the sorry state of how Requests for Enhancement are handled by most vendors. In the post, we see a proposal of how vendors might improve how RFEs are accepted and worked on seriously.
Obviously my blog has an EMC bent, but I work across a great many products, and the one thing I’ll say about most vendors, regardless of whether they’re OS vendors or hardware vendors or software vendors, they all share one common attribute:
A practically callous disregard for user input.
The most polite response I can think of to vendors who don’t treat RFEs as serious input is “bah humbug”.
Ignoring RFEs (or not working with them) is like the tail wagging the dog. It’s the company basically saying to the end users, “You don’t have a clue what you’re doing. You can’t possibly understand our product or our direction enough to provide valuable input.”
This isn’t to say that all RFEs are sensible. However, lumping all RFEs into the “sounds like s–t” basket simply because a few happen to be illogical (or are for features that already exist) is unfair to the average user who genuinely wishes to recommend enhancements to a product.
At IDATA, I’m the primary developer for IDATA Tools. My take on RFEs for these tools is that they are invaluable. They frequently point to usage scenarios that we hadn’t considered, and they demonstrate how customers need to extend their datazone administration for easier use. Wanting to ignore that would be … well, insane.
RFEs should be treasured. Good on Grumpy Storage for making the case so eloquently.
