pzrite opened this issue on Mar 11, 2010 · 44 posts
efstarlet posted Tue, 16 March 2010 at 12:43 PM
We also hoped that stuff like the staff video would help show a little more that we are trying to communicate and put ourselves out there. There is also a lot more to communication than the forums, and we are a very small team who can't be everywhere talking to everyone at once. If you have something to say to Smith Micro - PLEASE - contact us. There are multiple methods to email your suggestions, feature requests, etc. I was pretty surprised that when we offered an open feedback form at the beginning of this year, fewer people than I expected shared their opinions or feature requests. The feedback we got was plentiful enough for me to submit some opinions to the teams and was actually pretty amazing, but I truly expected a lot more in terms of volume.
I think the blog is awesome. (And funny, and no, I don't write it!) blog.smithmicro.com is not about announcements. It's about the art, the artists and the products. I'm not really here to defend our use of social networks, but I can say very clearly that had I not been on deviantART the past few months, our Poser Pro 2010 box wouldn't have such a kickass image and we wouldn't have been able to discover Paul Sutton. We're finding new artists and stories every day on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. People are out there sharing their art, and we're out there trying to talk to them about it. I can say since the launch of Manga Studio 4, Anime Studio 6 and Poser 8, there has been a decided turn in the tone towards communication with our users, and there is A LOT of back and forth happening. It is frankly why I love coming to work every day.
For what it's worth, I don't think anyone is piling it on. If anything, I was thinking yesterday, I have known a lot of the more frequent posters on here for many, many, years and I know how your opinions of the products and companies have changed, and I have a ton of respect for your feedback on the product, good or bad. I know that some people have very sensitive feelings about past actions of the company or their relationship with the product, but I also know the hard work put in here is appreciated a lot too. I collect it all, and do what I can.
Dave - I'll see what I can do about getting some sort of event set up where you can talk to some developers or ask questions. We've done things here at Rendo in the past where you could submit questions to product managers, it's been a while.