November 19th, 2006

Wrap up on CTP feedback

Brian Harry
Corporate Vice President

OK, I’ve digested the feedback from a variety of sources and want to play it back.  As with any sufficiently involved topic, I won’t capture everything everyone said but rather I’m just trying to capture the recurring patterns. So what I’ve heard is:

  • You like CTPs very much.  They provide a valuable way to get early insight into what is coming, engage in discussion and give feedback.
  • You like having them be frequent – most respondents were happy with the every 1 – 3 month range.  There seemed to be consensus that if they come too often you’ll skip some.
  • Quality of CTPs is not the #1 consideration but it seemed many would like for CTPs to be a little higher quality and would be willing to pay some frequency to get it but probably not much.
  • VPCs are very popular as a distribution mechanism – but not exclusively.  It seems clear we need to release both VPC and non-VPC versions to satisfy the needs.
  • Many of you remarked about the pain of many incompatible CTPs.  There’s a tension here between the cost to produce them (testing them with everything else) and the frequency but I hear that it’s something we should spend some time thinking about.  Maybe just being more explicit about what works with what would help some.
  • You would like us to be better about describing what is in a CTP – what you should look at and what you should avoid.

Have I captured the key feedback?  Is there anything important that I missed?

Brian

Author

Brian Harry
Corporate Vice President

Corporate Vice President for Cloud Developer Services.

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