Resolution #4: Clearly Document Our Technical and Product Support Policies

We have always prided ourselves on the outstanding technical support we provide our users. It is a hallmark of NI – where else do all of the Sales, Marketing, and even many of the R&D professionals all start their careers in the Technical Support Call Center? Where we’ve fallen down is in explaining important timeframes and policies so you know what to expect. For example, how long will we test hardware drivers with new hardware against a particular version? When are we planning on freezing development for a particular OS? If want support for a particular product for 10 years, what are your options?

I posted on this a few weeks ago looking for feedback.  We hope to clearly lay out these and many other details for you in 2009.

Resolution #3: Be More Transparent with Our Roadmaps

We are working on some really cool stuff in R&D that I can’t tell you about. However, the more I think about it, the more I believe that showing you what we are planning for the future has a lot more benefit (to all of us) than it has potential drawbacks.   It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that we need specific features, like Diagram Zoom, and we need general overhauls of certain aspects of the platform (user interface, compiler, etc).  I just need to come up with creative ways to start spreading the word to customers without causing trouble here.

For now, keep monitoring NILabs or plan on coming to NIWeek to see the cool, forward-looking keynote presentations.

Resolution #2: Provide Better Support for Third-Party LabVIEW Add-Ons

LabVIEW is such a huge platform that is used in so many application areas that we can’t do it all ourselves. We rely heavily on our customer community and third-party companies to extend, expand, connect to, or plug into LabVIEW to continue to push it in new directions. From a technical perspective, we could do a lot better at providing access, documentation, and a general architecture that would allow our users – particularly product/utility developers – to extend LabVIEW. Hopefully you will see some evidence that we are working to close this gap in 2009.

It’s not limited to technical issues either. We are reviewing our product “partnering programs” in great detail to come up with better ways to support the business (sales, marketing, distribution, etc) needs of people, from large platform companies to mom-and-pop shops, to deliver valuable addons to the user base. Just today, our LabVIEW Product Partnering guy gave the rest of the LabVIEW product managers a demo of JKISoftware’s VI Package Manager for LabVIEW (it’s relevant to this topic in a couple of dimensions).

Resolution #1: Get More Involved in the LabVIEW User Community

For years, NI’s LabVIEW leadership (Marketing and R&D – yes, that would be me and my compadres) have taken a fairly hands-off approach when it comes to commenting in the LabVIEW community – in particular, forums on external sites like LAVA or INFO-LV. I am not talking about the typical technical questions, but more about the posts that are controversial – like when people start questioning our intentions or believe that we have made an outright wrong decision on some policy or other. In the past, our approach has been to sit back and rely on our very active and supportive user base to jump to our defense rather than ourselves because it might come across as NI “tampering” or being “heavy handed.” In reality, that is an “old school” approach that we need to change. I believe that today, we need to be more open to jumping in and sharing our perspective on these discussions where we can (sometimes we can’t comment on revenue or strategy issues that are not public yet). Many users often wonder aloud in these discussions if we (NI management) are listening. We are – many people monitor INFO-LV and Lava forums here at NI. When flames spark, we sometimes fail to act. I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind, but just the fact that we are listening and sharing our perspective is a good start. I hope to use this blog to share these perspectives – whether in reaction to a particularly spirited discussion we see on the forums or in discussions with customers, or as a premptive strike on topics where we are looking for feedback.

I shouldn’t be too critical. About four years ago, we made some pretty significant changes to our End User License Agreement to accommodate home use and use on multiple computers that was spurred on by an INFO-LV discussion. So we try to do what’s right most of the time – we just don’t always close the loop with those of you who are chirping on the forums.

The truth is, for most of our customers, it’s not about the big policy decisions or strategy and positioning that is interesting – its mainly about the technology and how you can get the most out of it. This is another, more relevant example of where we are planning to get more involved. We have recently developed our own “blog college” training session to get some of our R&D engineers prepped and ready to enter the blogosphere. You will see new blogs in 2009 authored by some of our engineers in areas like developing large applications in LabVIEW, Embedded Control with LabVIEW, Advanced math, signal processing, and simulation with LabVIEW, and general LabVIEW development techniques. We want to show you techniques to maximize your investment in LabVIEW and expose you to some of the newer areas you can use LabVIEW, directly from the desks of our experts.

Stay tuned.

 

2009 LabVIEW New Year’s Resolutions

(Confessions of an NI LabVIEW Guy)

I, like many of you, are taking some time at the end of the year to reflect on the successes of 2008 as well as the gaps that still exist.  In thinking about next year’s goals, I thought it might be fun to share some of these with the LabVIEW community at large to get your feedback or commentary about.  Most of these address areas where I believe we have some shortcomings today, hence my “confessions” sub-title.  

For now, I will simply list my resolutions.  I will use a series of subsequent posts to explain in more detail each of these and what I hope to accomplish in 2009.

1. Get NI more active in the user community
2. Provide better support for third-party tools
3. Be more transparent with our roadmaps
4. Clearly document our “support” and product lifecycle policies
5. Get serious about addressing upgrading and deployment pain
6. (an extra bonus) Develop new, more effective ways to capture user input and feature requests (and act on it!)

I will follow up with more details about what each of these means in the near future.  For now, have a great holiday season.

LabVIEW and Giant Telescopes

For those of you who think the whole “LabVIEW is great for multicore programming” story is a bunch of hype, you need to check this out…

But first, a short digression.  One of the coolest (and more frustrating) things about working on LabVIEW is the fact that it can be used to solve so many different applications.  Big or small, test, design, or control – LabVIEW again and again comes up in the most incredible places.  When you find yourself talking with an NI person about LabVIEW, you quickly get the feeling that LabVIEW is “all things for all people” – which of course breaks every rule of marketing and product positioning.  But the reality is, you can use LabVIEW for a lot more applications than you think.  Our long legacy of test, measurement, and data acquisition sometimes gets in the way of people realizing that LabVIEW is a potential solution for other app areas.

One such area is advanced, high-speed control.  LabVIEW is uniquely positioned to combine advanced algorithms with best-in-the-world I/O capabilities.  Combine these algorithms with the parallel/multicore capabilities of the LabVIEW programming language – and you’ve got some real power.  

But rather than read about it, take a look at this YouTube video from Darren Schmidt - one of our math and analysis algorithm experts.   Darren has been toying around with running LabVIEW algorithms on an Nvidia Cuda GPU (stay tuned for some libraries coming soon on NI Labs), and in the process has gotten himself and team plugged into a large telescope application.   This video was shot at the Super Computing Conference, where LabVIEW was a finalist for the Supercomputing Analytics Challenge.