Acknowledge,
Office 2010 License, Identify, React
I’d like to take a moment to speak about the speed and quality of the past few release cycles. There’s no point in mincing words: it’s been less than what you and we have come to expect from EllisLab. If this has concerned you,
Windows 7 Serial, double or triple that concern, and that’s how we feel. And we have a plan in motion to fix it.
Solving this problem first required that we identify exactly what the cause was. We have talented developers who love our products and our community, so this was not something easily pinpointed. It required taking a big step back to look at both the composition of our team as well as the processes we were using as a company to help the team succeed.
Oddly enough, our main proverbial threat is also our biggest success: wildly explosive growth. There was a time I can remember knowing just about every new user’s screen name, and active community members very well. Now there are often 1000+ new members each day across our three products’ communities. Not only do we lose that opportunity for close and frequent communication,
Office Professional Plus, but it also exponentially increases the number of environments our software is used in, the ways in which it’s implemented, the diversity of expectation, the desired feature set, etc.
Right now our biggest challenge is scaling our internal structure concurrently with the new growth we’re experiencing while sticking to our roots (no “going corporate”,
Office 2007 Enterprise, no VC money). We want to keep the same spirit that EllisLab enjoyed when there were just three or four of us, while making adjustments to staff and work practices that will allow us to succeed alongside this significant growth (which we are thankful for).
It is unrealistic to think that we can rise to this challenge without fundamentally changing aspects of how we work and how we communicate, both internally and with our Community. All of us at EllisLab are committed to throwing out what is bad, embracing what works, and continuing to work with the Community to make ExpressionEngine everything it can be.
This leads us to good news. ExpressionEngine 2.1.1 is almost complete and represents the first of a few planned releases to 2.1.x whose primary purpose is to address bugs and prevent new bugs from creeping in. These releases will come relatively quickly before the team sinks its teeth into 2.2.
Lastly,
Office 2007 Pro, we’ll be hiring another developer soon. We’re looking for a talented developer to add to our primary dev team. If you’re interested in teaming up with EllisLab during this revamp and would love to start contributing to ExpressionEngine directly, get your resumés and code sample ready! We’ll announce it on the EE Blog and our jobs page when we start formally accepting applications. We’ve already had several unsolicited applications and we certainly welcome more from those who don’t want to wait. Is that you?