Dear Tim,
It may seem you can't do things right, whatever you do. Ancestry.com got criticised when it started Expert Connect, and now it gets criticised for stopping Expert Connect. You know very well it is not as simple as that, that these two decisions are not criticised for the same reasons.
You've never really listened to the genealogy community, but you have shareholders now, and they don't understand what you are doing. It wasn't clear why you started Expert Connect and it isn't clear why you are discontinuing it, thus inviting speculation about your reasons. It certainly isn't clear why you are discontinuing Expert Connect in such a hurry that the vocal complaints from the genealogists you are ousting are sure to hurt Ancestry.com's public image.
Genealogists have no reason to trust you. Ancestry.com is still charging
subscription fees for work your members intended to share with the world for
free.
You've turned RootsWeb into a large Ancestry.com advertisement. You've harvested
copyrighted material, and then tried to charge genealogists for access to this
Internet Biographical Collection
. When the proverbial excrement hit the
rotating blades, you did not honestly admit that you were wrong to steal, but
started to lie that it was just a search engine...
There is a serious problem with your corporate culture. Back in 2007, you
introduced Family Tree Maker 2008 through a Beta release. To say that the user
feedback was that the program wasn't finished is putting it mildly, yet you
choose to ignore all the feedback you received and release it anyway. Unsurprisingly, Family
Tree Maker 2008 promptly won the GeneAward for Worst Genealogy Product of 2007.
Remarkably, soon after your Brand Manager admitted that the product has too many
defects, and that stability, performance and missing features were top
priorities, Family Tree Maker got another brand manager. Perhaps these two
events are not related, but the new one hasn't displayed the same honesty about
the product's serious shortcomings.
Have you heard about Unicode? Tell me, what's the point of making a new application using new technology, when you don't take advantage of that technology to make something better than the application you already have? Windows is built on Unicode, Microsoft .NET is built on Unicode, C# uses Unicode, yet somehow Family Tree Maker doesn't support Unicode. Congratulations, you managed to mess up the major feature the technology provided you for free...
It is fairly obvious that you do not listen to users, but you do not even
need to listen to your users to understand that some of the things you are doing
are less than user-friendly.
After several years, New Family Tree Maker continues be
limited in its ability to read files created by Family Tree Maker Classic.
Family Tree Maker Classic often created FTW TEXT files while lying to the user
that it was creating a GEDCOM file. That New Family Tree Maker ended that
dishonest practice is great, that it does not read these ostensible GEDCOM
files
isn't so great. That even the latest version, Family Tree Maker 2011, still
cannot even read FTW GEDCOM 5.3 files is pathetic.
You had plenty of time to create an FTW TEXT to FTW GEDCOM conversion utility
and fix New Family Tree Maker's poor GEDCOM import routine, but you still
haven't done so.
A rather troublesome observation is that you do not seem to learn from mistakes. Last year, you released Family Tree Maker for Mac; it is a native MacOS application, but it is also an application that has less features, yet is more expensive than the Windows variant. Worst of all, the file formats of Family Tree Maker for Mac and Family Tree Maker for Windows are different. It would have been better to continue development, to match the features available on Windows and to upgrade to a file format supported by both. Sadly, you once again decided to rush out an unfinished product...
Your notion of supporting the Windows product isn't too hot either. It is unnecessarily hard to find a Service Pack, you apparently never bothered to test Family Tree Maker with a firewall, and your idea of addressing its poor performance is writing a blog post that tells users to remove duplicate entries, run the Compact File tool, work offline and disable FastFields.
It is hard to be impressed by Ancestry.com's communication skills. Your PR people
apparently have no time to answer questions, because they are busy making up
Dracula claims. Your idea of
communicating with genealogists is sponsoring a copy & paste blogger who
dutifully defends his sponsor whenever some commenter remarks that Ancestry.com
is a monopoly.
You PR department seems rather fond of copy & paste bloggers in more ways
than one, but communicating with yes-men
isn't real communication. You
shouldn't be sponsoring a copy & paste blogger, you should be reaching out to
and communicating with original content bloggers instead.
Here's a shocking idea: start listening to users. Come on, take a look at the many comments users leave on the Ancestry.com Family Tree Maker blog. I suspect that you will be shocked by how different the product reality is from the picture that internal managers are painting you.
Perhaps you've been so shielded from the real world that all of this is new to you, and that must be a lot of bad news to take in. The good news is that you are in position to do something about it all. You are the CEO.
You can explain your Expert Connect decisions. You can decide to make the trees that genealogists intended to share with the world free to the world. You can treat RootsWeb as more than an opportunity to advertise Ancestry.com. You can win major kudos by finally admitting that the Internet Biographical Collection was theft, and apologise for it.
You can have a good look at what you expect from brand managers. You can tell your developers to stop messing up the Unicode support their tools provide for free. You can tell them to create an FTW TEXT to FTW GEDCOM conversion utility, to improve the GEDCOM import and stop releasing unfinished products. You can decide to freeze development of new features to focus on addressing defects of existing features instead, including its poor performance.
You can tell your PR people to stop making up things for PR value alone. You can apologise for their fabrications and tell them to run all their claims by a real genealogist. You can stop sponsoring and otherwise favouring copy & paste bloggers, and focus on communicating with original content bloggers instead. You can spend some of your own time reading user comments to stay in touch with the reality of your products.
There are eleven months left to make Family Tree Maker 2011 Seriously
Improved Second Edition win an GeneAward for its quality instead of its lack
thereof. Are you up for that challenge?
You are the CEO. You are in charge. You can fix things if you want to.
P.S. Here's a hot tip; sponsoring OpenGen and BetterGEDCOM would be a good way to show that you care about genealogy standards, and get some positive PR in the process.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.