Daring Fireball VS. Omnigroup Round 2
In a recent article I accused John Gruber of unfairly associating Omnigroup’s upcoming GTD application Omnifocus with vaporware. Omni obviously agreed and responded to the accusations.
Mr. Gruber, having gotten Omnigroup to take the bait, went from a one line jab to a full on rant. I’m a fan of Daring Fireball. I own the t-shirt. But this was one rant that missed the mark, basically relying on a list of one or two line definitions from random sources.
From Ryan Cannon:
Not only is his use of the dictionary pedantic and sophomoric, but Gruber also ignores the context of why Omni might posts these announcements.
Regardless the dictionary definition, “Vaporware” in every circle I’ve ran in, connotes a product promised, hyped, and in bad faith left undelivered. By calling OmniFocus vaporware, Gruber is calling the Omni Group liars.
The first point is dead on, the second basically what I stated before but in even stronger terms. Relying on rudimentary definitions of vaporware was especially surprising for someone of John Gruber’s intelligence. A simple definition of the titanic might be “a very large ship that hit an iceberg and sank”, but it certainly doesn’t tell the whole story, nor why the ship’s name lives on in infamy. Vaporware by definition is “software that has been announced but not released”. But that’s certainly not the entire story, nor does it give any hint as to why the word has a negative connotation. John Gruber is aware of this, but giving a well rounded definition of vaporware with even the slightest historical perspective would eat away at the very foundation of his argument.
A couple of years back Dan Benjamin of Hivelogic, a friend of Mr. Grubers, mentioned several times that he was in the process of releasing a personal publishing system called Postmaster. I was a frequent reader of Hivelogic and wanted to try it out. Several years went by with nothing released. Eventually (I’m guessing) the idea was dropped and instead a CMS for business use, Pilot, was released. Not to reflect negatively on Dan Benjamin, but that’s the very idea of vaporware. (Waiting to receive a t-shirt 5 months after purchasing it might also be a better example of vaporware than the situation at Omnigroup.)
Another point of my previous article and mentioned in both Omnigroup’s and Cannon’s responses was that Omnifocus was brought up for discussion on Omnigroup’s blog. There was no press release, it’s not on the omni front page, there’s no ‘upcoming applications’ on Omnigroup’s site. The open dialogue was done for the benefit of Omnigroup’s fans and certainly welcomed. As I wrote previously:
Of one thing I’m sure. Omnigroup will keep the dialogue open, allowing the customer an inside glimpse at the development process, listening to questions and taking request into consideration. And for me, that’s much more important than a debate on vaporware.
This still doesn’t take into consideration that Omnifocus is in many ways a collaboration between prominent factions in the GTD community. Not only would Omnigroup have to keep Omnifocus a secret, Merlin Mann and Ethan J. A. Schoonover would also have to remain silent to satisfy Mr. Gruber’s desire for software developed in complete secrecy. That’s getting to be quite a list.
As I’ve said before, I’m a fan of John Gruber’s writing. But in this case, he’s simply off the mark with his accusations, both by definition and in basic understanding of the dynamics of a community. Omnigroup has done nothing wrong, and if Omnigroup fans (who else would read the Omnigroup blog?) choose to pass on other possible GTD applications while waiting on Omnifocus then that’s a feather in Omnigroups cap and a result of making great software for the mac in the past.
As a side note, when I originally read Mr. Gruber’s article I was struck by one of his comments which seemed to carry more anger than his normal writing:
Maybe OmniFocus is going to be a nice app like OmniOutliner or OmniGraffle. Maybe it’s going to be a complex, over-designed turd like OmniPlan. But today, it’s vaporware.
Upon future readings I noticed a slight change. The word “turd” was changed to “monster” without comment. Granted, this isn’t quite up to the level of Dave Winer’s shenanigans, but at a time when professional bloggers are searching for the credibility of their more traditional counterparts it certainly doesn’t help.
