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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Planning Meetings
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
This week, I'll be heading to Cincinnati for planning meetings - I'm meeting with the engineering team leads, the engineering manager, as well as parts of sales and marketing. Our goal is to take stock of where we are, and to look ahead to where we should be going.
This is actually more difficult now than it has been. Why? Well, to be honest, guiding the direction of the product was very, very easy from 2000 until the VW 7 release. With the chaos that had ensued in the endgame of ParcPlace/ObjectShare's life, the product had stagnated. As a sales engineer, I was always being told what the product lacked, and what we needed to to with it. That actually made life pretty simple for me when I became Product Manager - there was so much to do, and I already had a very clear notion of what things were lacking.
Now, we aren't done with all of that - Pollock and GLORP, for instance are still under development, and there are numerous tools/presentation issues to deal with. Still, most of the things in that area are moving in the right direction already for VisualWorks, and with ObjectStudio, we have decided on a tighter integration with .NET and the CLR as the way to go. These things are all in motion, and will be bearing fruit over the next few months and years.
That leaves business direction and general strategy. The technical issues are no longer the main things we have to worry about; we've caught up after the PPS stagnation, and, to my mind, gotten into a very good place vis-a-vis Java and .NET from a technical perspective. Unfortunately, the technical perspective is really not the biggest thing facing us. We are experiencing steady growth, and Smalltalk is a profitable business for Cincom - but we would very much like to make it more than that. That's what the meetings we are having are going to be about. I don't expect any grandiose changes or directions in the short term, but we are going to start talking about what should happen next.
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