I don’t know who invented software, but sometimes I want to take them out back and wring their neck. The problem is that it always takes longer to build good software than you planned. And while it has gotten immeasurably easier over the years when we try to innovate we still find ourselves out on the bleeding edge and confronting our own demons.
The demons those of us on the design, marketing, and development teams at Rocket Technology Labs face is that we are perfectionists, and in software that makes you your own worst enemy. Sometimes, however, it’s better just to face your demons and make a deal with them.
The deal we’ve struck with our own demons is to delay the release of our beta version of Rocketvox until we have a few more cool features embedded and can get a little closer to the unreachable quality we want. We’re past the painful decisions about what cool features not to include – that’s the first hurdle every one of us in this industry faces when we set deadlines and try to meet them. We’re now finishing the few things we’ve collectively decided we can’t leave out of Rocketvox Beta, and so our deadline has slipped.
What we are trying to do is both redesign and simplify the way we manage our communications and we want to have enough functionality in our beta to demonstrate where we’re going. Our focus is on making all communications from real-time to static accessible and manageable through a common user experience across devices. This means Twitter and status update streams as well as email, text messaging (SMS), chat (IM), voice, voicemail, and even fax.
Our goal is to make all of these communications channels tunable and uniformly available whether we are at our computer or mobile. It’s a big task and there are any number of bigger companies with far more resources than our little one chasing this holy grail. That’s where our technical approach comes in. We think we can and are doing this better, more powerfully, and making the experience simpler and more comprehensive for the user than our competitors. Doing it right and testing it takes time, and our eagerness to get our beta out is now balanced by our need to get it to where we’ve drawn our line in the sand.
What’s still on our plate is final integration of simplified social network messaging, some email and user interface brush up, and finishing and testing our voice network registration processing.
We will get the Beta into your hands very soon. In the meantime help us keep those software demons occupied elsewhere. Ask them to go bug someone with more money and resources than we have – tell them they’ll have more fun causing trouble at Google or Microsoft. In the meantime, we’re dealing with them here and are almost finished. We think you’ll like what we are working on!
