How many times has a company or developer gotten you excited about a new product or service only to drop off the face of the planet with no update? If your like me, it happens to you every day. It is not only frustating but potentially detrimental to your work as it effects purchase decisions if you decide to wait something out or buy something with the promise of SOON.

I am fed up.

Dan Ahern and I were talking last night, getting upset at a certain development house’s practices of going on their message boards and getting everyone all excited about features and release dates only to disappear for months and months and months. Dan had the brilliant idea of creating a standard, what I will call the Development Communications Standard, which a company or developer could be “certified” in and would require them to give periodic updates including future plans for product/service development, bug fixes and expected release dates.

Of course plans change, but updates like this will enable users/customers to at least be kept in the loop and hopefully official published information will allow users to set expectations of how reliable a company/developer is … just like that friend who you know is always late… at least you have proper expectations when they say they will be there at 9pm you know it is more like 11.

The idea is still very vague, but I would think it would entail some sort of spec outlining the information that should be provided, the frequency of the information and a sort of badge or listing of companies that meet that requirement to help the users/customers make a more informed decision.

What do you think?