>And you know what's the biggest thing holding them back? The fear that people will make fun of the first thing they launch.
Good.
The software world is absolutely flooded with half baked crap backed by expensive marketing. As a software user it's a waste of my time when somebody releases "A Simply Remarkable Spreadsheet" that allows you to "organize and work with them in a whole new intuitive way" and it lacks the basic features I expect from a spreadsheet (I suppose that is indeed remarkable). Worse, it leads to a situation where customers don't trust software developers to provide the things they say they are providing.
What would you have us do? Not criticize massively hyped app releases that are backed by millions of dollars of VC money because we might hurt somebodies feelings? If you are going to make a big fanfare about your new 'spreadsheet' app, then you have to be prepared for the (predictable) negative reaction when it turns out it isn't actually a spreadsheet at all. Don't get pissed off when it gets criticism after you flood all the tech news sites with press releases and submit your site to all the aggregators and email dozens of bloggers.
The people doing this are savvy and know what they are doing, which is basically conning users with false promises. They know it will earn them criticism from people who are paying attention, they don't care, they are in it for the money. Your portrayal of the innocent, uncertain, timid startup CEO is pretty laughable. These are business graduates that decided to go into software startups because they think there is more money in it than investment banking at the moment, many have never written any software themselves.
You can whine all you want but customers are always going to complain when the product does not meet the description. It's really quite simple to avoid this though: stop lying in your marketing.
Edit: I didn't mean to make it sound like I think the Grid folks themselves are actually upset about this criticism, I'm sure they are not. They must have had many meetings trying to decide if they should call it a spreadsheet even though it isn't, and they obviously decided to do it because they feel they will get more attention as a 'mobile spreadsheet' rather than some vaguely defined data organiser. It was a calculated move that seems to be paying off at the initial launch at least, since the app is getting far more attention than most.
Good.
The software world is absolutely flooded with half baked crap backed by expensive marketing. As a software user it's a waste of my time when somebody releases "A Simply Remarkable Spreadsheet" that allows you to "organize and work with them in a whole new intuitive way" and it lacks the basic features I expect from a spreadsheet (I suppose that is indeed remarkable). Worse, it leads to a situation where customers don't trust software developers to provide the things they say they are providing.
What would you have us do? Not criticize massively hyped app releases that are backed by millions of dollars of VC money because we might hurt somebodies feelings? If you are going to make a big fanfare about your new 'spreadsheet' app, then you have to be prepared for the (predictable) negative reaction when it turns out it isn't actually a spreadsheet at all. Don't get pissed off when it gets criticism after you flood all the tech news sites with press releases and submit your site to all the aggregators and email dozens of bloggers.
The people doing this are savvy and know what they are doing, which is basically conning users with false promises. They know it will earn them criticism from people who are paying attention, they don't care, they are in it for the money. Your portrayal of the innocent, uncertain, timid startup CEO is pretty laughable. These are business graduates that decided to go into software startups because they think there is more money in it than investment banking at the moment, many have never written any software themselves.
You can whine all you want but customers are always going to complain when the product does not meet the description. It's really quite simple to avoid this though: stop lying in your marketing.
Edit: I didn't mean to make it sound like I think the Grid folks themselves are actually upset about this criticism, I'm sure they are not. They must have had many meetings trying to decide if they should call it a spreadsheet even though it isn't, and they obviously decided to do it because they feel they will get more attention as a 'mobile spreadsheet' rather than some vaguely defined data organiser. It was a calculated move that seems to be paying off at the initial launch at least, since the app is getting far more attention than most.