Last week, I found out that one of my best friends is dead. I first met John Midtgard in 6th grade. Since we left the cradle of Zephyrhills High School back in 1984 (me) and 1985 (John), we have each moved several times. We’d be apart for a few years, but then once we got back together, it would be like no time had passed. We’d just pick right back up, still good friends. The first parting was when I went off to UF a year before John did. He of course caught up with me soon enough. Then I joined the Navy for four years while John went off to Seattle for a while, and we regrouped again back in Gainesville, Florida, in 1990. It sucks that he died during another one of those forkings of our paths, and the most prolonged.
A few months ago, we chose to add some new features to SVS and change “SVS 2.0 SP2″ into “SVS 2.1″. This is causing customers to wait longer for some important bug fixes that were targeted for 2.0 SP2. In my first draft of this post, I went into all of the details of the decision and explained our QA process and so forth, in hopes that you would appreciate why one project and one release is ultimately better for customers. But I don’t want to go through all that; since SVS 2.1 beta 1 shipped, the heat seems to be off. Everyone is happy with the performance fixes and many customers are rolling the 2.1 beta into production as if it were in fact 2.0 SP2. Still, I wanted to vent a bit of frustration over an issue that most (if not all) software PM’s are familiar with.
