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.