Bad upgrade behavior
So I finally gave in and decided I “needed” bluetooth, and got a Treo 650. I synced my 600, made sure everything was on my computer, upgraded the software, and synced the 650.
All my Floating Events were gone.
You may not cringe in horror at that sentence, but I did. I had a perfectly working system that compensated for the 600’s lack of alarms on the to-do list, scheduling “events” that I could check off as I finished the associated task, and they would yell at me daily until I finished them. Perfect.
Until they were gone. Left in their place was the technical representation of that workaround, a note labeled ##f attached to a regular appointment. They didn’t follow me any more, and after the first day they were slipping into history with nary a complaint.
What kind of upgrade idiocy is that?
If you build a function [Floating Events] and sell the software to users, then replace it with a different but (mostly) equivalent function [Tasks with alarms], you don’t just drop all the old data! Customer loyalty is built on ease of use and reliability (or a monopoly, but that’s a different story) and you don’t destroy or even hazard their data… ever!
How to fix it? Write a little tool that, when installed on your computer with the new 650 software, scans all appointments and copies any with the ##f into tasks-with-alarms. Don’t rely on users to do the work. I had floating events scheduled more than a year out, and now I have to track them down when the whole reason for having them was so I did not have to remember they existed!
The moral of this story? Always, always make sure you have protected your users when you provide an upgrade path or any changes.