LabVIEW 2010 New Years’ Resolutions

After listing out what I thought we needed to focus on for 2009 in the form of “New Year’s Resolutions” last year, I am now getting pushed by some of the folks here in our Marketing group to come up with my 2010 resolutions list.   The good news is that a fair number of people (including some internal people here at NI) read my list of resolutions and tracked our results through the year.  The bad news is that now it has become an expectation – so here in the first week of February I am laying out my 2010 list – better late than never.

Before looking at a new list, it’s important to understand that everything on the 2009 list is still in play.  I don’t think any of them are completely “finished”, but for the sake of progress, I am going to put most of them into “business as usual” mode for 2010.  However, two items from last year jump out such that they require continued focus in 2010:

1. Provide better support for third-party tools – We made a lot of progress in 2009, but most of it was in the area of internal awareness and investment.  You should start to see more results externally in 2010.  Its important that we follow through on the investment we made last year. 
2. Get serious about upgrade and deployment pain – This is an area where I think we can do better.  The hardest part of this is quantifying our improvement – how do we know that upgrading from an earlier version to LV 2009 is better?  We rely on word of mouth and personal experience through our Tech Support and system engineering resources.  I feel like this is still an area of unfinished business, so its staying on the list.

Now for a few new items for 2010:

1. Simplify the product learning curve
2. Help users manage their NI software better
3. Build better tools for capturing customer input

All three of these are topics which will probably not be able to be solved in a year.  However, similar to supporting third-party tools in 2009, we have to make some internal plans and investments this year if we are to make progress in the future.   I hope to use forums like this blog or NIWeek to preview our ideas with the user community to ensure we are on the right path.   I’ll add some more detail to these in subsequent posts… In the meantime, I can at least say that my LabVIEW 2010 New Years’ Resolutions list is official:

1. Simplify the product learning curve
2. Help users manage their NI software better
3. Build better tools for capturing customer input
4. Support third-party tools (carryover from 2009)
5. Reduce upgrade and deployment pain (carryover from 2009)