On Apr 4, 2011, at 10:25 AM, Chuck Pelto wrote:

> Yeah... Buy one and then, if FMI sees it as profitable, they generate it. Or maybe they'll be bribed to hold off, as I suspect they are for various other features offered by some third parties I can think of that want $1000 for a developer's license to use their plug-in.

Chuck,

You should talk to FMI about it. Perhaps then you won't make so many assumptions about how they decide on which features make the cut.

Every feature has a cost. Aside from the additional coding required, there's a chance of causing a regression elsewhere, there's a chance of making the product "worse" (e.g. alienating users who find the new product more difficult to use), there's the added cost of documentation, etc.

In weighing these costs, FMI does take into consideration third party products, both from a "don't want to piss off our developer partners" perspective as well as a "there's already a good workaround for the lack of this feature" perspective.

And so, as a result of that calculus, you get a feature like SMTP send which allows for only a single attachment and doesn't handle HTML, etc. FMI has decided that this limited feature set is sufficient for enough of their users, and for those that want more there are established products in the market to meet that need.

If plug-in developers were to bribe FMI for anything, it would probably be more documentation for and better support of the plug-in API. :)

Cheers,
-corn


Cornelius Walker
The Proof Group
http://proofgroup.com/