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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jgsugden" data-source="post: 4683830" data-attributes="member: 2629">And? If you know that solving a difficult Sodoku puzzle takes you between 5 and 25 minutes, don't tell your significant other that you'll be done with it in 5 minutes. If you KNOW that you're going to have trouble keeping to a certain schedule - don't promise it. WotC should NOT have 'announced' a timeline of any sort - either implicit or explicit - that it could not be pretty darn sure it could meet. Software design is often more art than science, but that doesn't mean that you can't put structure around it. If you're going to sell a software product, you still need to face the economic realities of the business surrounding the product. If you think it will take between 2 and 14 months to build something, make plans accordingly. Figure out what to do if it is ready in 2 months, and figure out what to do if it is ready in 14 months. WotC had a product in mind. They did early development. They brought it to an alpha state BEFORE GenCon 07. They made statements that indicated that they'd have a distributable version of that software in summer 08 at GenCon 07. Nobody is saying that they didn't have difficulties. Nobody is saying that meeting that schedule wouldn't be hard. (Well, maybe some idiots are syaing that, but that isn't what most of us are ticked off about.)What critics are saying is that WotC should have been as smart as you - smart enough to realize that there are problems making software and that it isn't easy to get things out on a specific date. If they'd been that smart, they wouldn't have indicated that the product would be available last summer when, as it turns out, we may not even see it this summer.</blockquote>

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