Say What? Libronix no longer supported????

Now for my use of the phrase 'hard time with honesty' and elsewhere 'challenged with honesty'. For that, let me use three examples; maybe our definitions are different (as they are in our society).

Denise, I think we've got a vocabulary problem: I don't think these examples fit the dictionary's definition of "honesty" problems. And since a lot of people consider it an important word, I think it's irresponsible of you to re-purpose it to "I don't like the way you changed the feature set in the new version." Your use, out of context of the (not dishonest) examples you present, borders on slander.

'Dan' does 99% of the talking for Logos (marketing).

You're out of date. Dan does close to zero of the talking for Logos marketing. The blog, the NewsWire, the alerts, the emails are (to the best of my knowledge) almost 100% written by the marketing team, which now reports to Phil, who reports to Dan (who is in a separate building).

So is Dan off the hook and restored (by virtue of his silence, at least) to an honest reputation?

(I'm not trying to throw the marketing team under the bus, either. I don't think they're being dishonest, but they are a large team and very few of them even worked here when we last sold Libronix (pre Nov 2009), so they don't always have context, knowledge of what some users perceive to be commitments made long ago, or even how everything works. I'd call this a communication challenge, not the moral shortcoming of "an honesty problem.")

"We try to be completely transparent." There, I'd have to respectfully disagree. At each step of the way, users have to guess where you're going and what you're doing. Should we talk about 'notes'? In your Libronix product the support was quite extensive, but when you rolled out Logos4, a considerable amount of functionality was missing. You said 'well, gee, I can't keep every feature.' True. But what happened to their previous notes? Ditto on PPB, and even more so; they literally paid for the rights to use it. Today, you brag concerning PB, being free etc. but will you then trash today's PB plus notes in your version 5? It's actually quite likely.

So when a new product doesn't have the features of an older version, that's "dishonest?" I feel like I've already addressed this enough... 

you've developed a reputation for being over-priced and slow. What's that have to do with the challenge of honesty? Plenty. A customer moving from your Libronix to your Logos4 suddenly finds their Bible study impacted. You say 'Well, please continue to use Libronix.' Oh really? If I remember right, that lasted all of one year before the MS patch requirement, etc and one year later 'sorry'. In my case, I knew you'd do that and prepared.

Huh? We write Logos 4 on Microsoft's announced new tech platform for Windows, which runs slower on existing machines, and that's an honesty challenge? And as for continuing to use Libronix / MS patch issue, etc. -- are you referring to how an update of Internet Explorer, released after we released Logos 4, impacted Libronix? If you remember, we went back and fixed that for our old Libronix product after we'd already released Logos 4! Isn't that the amazing support for a retired product that was broken by Microsoft at no fault of ours? And "one year later"? What are you referring to? It still works! We haven't disabled it, we've just stopped new book releases! (I'm getting a feeling of deja vu... have I said that before? :-) )

Then you said only 2012 resources had been impacted. But when I later bought a Libronix-era book, the invoice had been reprogrammed to prevent me from downloading it (Libronix), AND the email pointed back to the reprogrammed invoice. I wondered why the 'staff' would do that; it was a lot of work. Per you, it was  'the staff' that wanted to end Libronix support (2012 books) but the actual programming ended even pre-2012 support. Like the examples above, something doesn't wash.

Again, huh? How does this not wash? We stopped releasing everything for two platforms. We had one email template that was used to send a "what to do" email after you bought a book. It had two platform instructions. Since the two platform instructions wouldn't be relevant for the new titles, the single template (used for every product) was changed to just reflect the instructions for our current, shipping (two year old!) platform. How does this not wash? It seems incredibly obvious. And it wasn't a lot of work, it was the easiest thing that could possibly work. What would be "hard" would be writing, testing and deploying new code that checked each invoice to see if any line item was for a pre-2012 release, then including download instructions for two platforms for some line items, and for one platform for others.

What was your basis for removing Bible note-taking and PBB support? Was it honest, that while you were literally selling PBB support, you were planning its demise? That your customers would have to dump their work?

What do you mean by removing Bible note-taking? Has the product ever not supported notes on a Bible? Or are you referring to something I don't understand. And about selling PBB while planning its demise -- do you mean pre-Nov 2009 when we sold Libronix, but knew we wouldn't read HTML PBB books in Logos 4? We didn't even know then -- we just guessed! We shipped Logos 4 without having started implementing a Loos 4 version of PBB; all we knew was that people hated our dependency on Internet Explorer, and we said up front we were removing that. We didn't even know then if we'd be able to import those old PBB's or not. Again, this insistence that every feature exist in every new version (in exactly the same way!) seems ridiculous.

When your customers could easily use your previous software, stand-alone in far off places, and you programmed so they could not in the future do so (while you continued selling them resources), were you honest?

Again -- this is an honesty issue? That we wrote an application in 2009 that shared things via the Internet (so we could support things like iPhones, only invented shortly before)? Because our having sold an application (first in 1991!) that ran without the Internet (which no one had in 1991!) we had somehow made a promise to never require the Internet? (Which we still don't!)

Have you ever sent an email to someone you'd previously written a paper letter to? Maybe years before? If you did, would that be a dishonest change in your relationship? You'd previously been willing to engage them in a personal way, in a preservable, scrapbook-able form that reflected personal effort and physical involvement. And now you coldly type out emails that fade into the ether when the power is off, and which can't be held and read by firelight in a cabin with no power...

I'm just going to stop. This is ridiculous. 

Transparency, indeed.... We have 250 employees selling 20,000 different books on multiple software platforms on multiple hardware platforms.  There is no way on earth that 250 people can know everything each other is doing or planning, and no way that we can answer every question accurately. Moreover, many of the questions we answer each day are about our plans and intentions and technical predictions. And we often don't know ourselves! Technology changes constantly. Our users change constantly. Our plans change constantly! When we shipped Logos 4 the iPad hadn't been announced! Android didn't matter. There was no Kindle Fire. Microsoft was still advocating WPF.

We're not the Soviet Central Committee with a "50 Year Plan to Lead the World in Concrete Production." We don't know the future, and our plans aren't immutable.

We answer every question as best we can when we're asked. It is 100% the truth as we know it when we answer it. I'm sorry that things change, features are dropped, things reprioritized, etc. But that's technology and business. The world moves on.

It's okay if you don't move at the same pace. I don't mind if you don't have the same speed setting for new stuff or the same tolerance for leaving the past behind. But I wish we could separate "I don't like the changes" from "you're morally deficient."

Do you attend a church with 250 people? Could all of them state the church's position on the canonicity of the pericope adulterae? Or some other theological point? Could all of them correctly answer the question, "Was the youth group meeting canceled this week?" I'll bet not. And I'll bet some would think they knew the right answer and tell you the wrong one.

Do you attend a church of dishonest liars? 

It's clear some people will never forgive me for Logos 4. I am amazed, amused, and even a bit flattered that so many people really prefer Libronix. We designed it in 1998. My son was in kindergarten; he's applying to college now! I've moved on. I'm sorry if I dragged your favorite Bible software tool forward before you were ready, and I'm sorry that my idea of what was and wasn't needed in the future didn't match yours.

I feel good about Logos 4 overall, though, because the aggregate evidence supports us: sales literally doubled in a single year after we released Logos 4. Positive feedback went up. Customer complaints and service calls per user dropped by around a third. The "most hated" features of Libronix-lovers (cloud syncing, notes being copied to the server, etc.) are, in the aggregate, the specific features that have earned the most positive feedback.

So I'm done feeling bad about it. It still runs. We supported it even after we replaced it. We built new books for it for two years. And I'm still here in the forums being "put on trial" for not preserving the past in amber.

but will you then trash today's PB plus notes in your version 5? It's actually quite likely.

Logos 5, unlike Logos 4, is not a complete re-design. We don't have plans to change anything I would consider fundamental. But I can guarantee we'll change some things, and now I'm pretty sure that some of you will hate it.

As if this isn't long enough ... I'll preempt next year's accusations of dishonesty by telling you exactly what might happen and why:

I designed the handouts feature. I like it. It's not on the Mac, and we've said that it's not immediately planned there because it would require a fundamental re-write, since the Windows implementation uses a WPF-specific feature.

At the moment, it's planned for the Mac. The new technology we need for laying out handouts is being coded now, for both platforms. We're doing it for something else. We don't know how fast it'll perform, or if it'll meet all handouts needs, but it's in the right direction.

Right now, handouts lacks the support of some people in the company. They think it's a complicated feature that didn't get any traction. Only a few people use it, and they have complaints. Fixing the things they don't like will be hard and expensive. The new technology will still needs lots of work to re-implement handouts on top of it. 

People are carrying smart-phones and tablets. More and more every year. By the time Logos 5 is done it might be more reasonable to have a pastor email a list of links to Biblia.com than to print a paper handout to give out physically.

Even if not, as we approach shipping Logos 5, we may run low on time. We may want to get the other data and features out and not have handouts done on Mac. We may not want to take the heat of Mac users complaining of no feature parity.

Handouts might get cut late in the process. Or might not.

Dishonest to put that feature in 4, announce plans to have it on the Mac, and then not get there? By your definition, apparently so. But not by mine. Because Handouts might be there -- better than ever. At this point I don't even know.  And when I do know it'll probably be a single case in a three hour triage meeting where dozens of features are ruled in or out based on tech, schedule, unforseen issues, etc.

That's how it works. And that's why I'm here, answering questions, telling you the current status, and, I believe, being transparent. But still, I'll never be able to meet all your needs, or tell you everything, because some of you will never forgive handouts coming out of the product, no matter how good the reason, and we can't remember o physically manage to tell you every decision as it's made -- that meeting will be one of four being held simultaneously, all with some decision some user would have liked to have known at that moment...