In this industry, we have to be very careful which features we select to add to our products each release.  Even with the growing amount of time and scrutiny dedicated to choosing these features, we occasionally miss the mark.  As an illustration of this point, I am going to talk about Coors, and Smokey and the Bandit.  Try to stick with me until the end where I will try to tie all this together.  At the very least, you will understand why I am not a teacher.

The Coors Brewing Company of of Golden, Colorado, USA, had a fairly profound impact on the thirty-somethings in the world like myself.  You see, we have been led to believe for thirty years or so that it was once illegal to transport Coors beer East of Texas.  As far as I can tell, this was never true (although it was not nationally available until sometime in the 1990s).  Nonetheless it was the plot of the hit 1977 movie Smokey and the Bandit.  And when I say “hit 1977 movie”, it was the second highest grossing movie of that year.  Star Wars was number one.  It is not Scorcese or [fill in name of artsy director you like here], but it was a big deal.

I don’t want to get off on a big tangent here, but a small one is necessary, stick with me.  For anybody who did not get basic cable over the last thirty years, the basic plot is as follows:

• It is illegal to ship Coors beer East of Texas
• Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed are paid a large some of money to get 400 cases Coors beer from Texarkana, Texas to Atlanta, Georgia in twenty-eight hours
• Burt Reynolds distracts cops from the speeding eighteen wheeler carrying the 400 cases of beer by performing really cool stunts in a 1977 Trans Am
  • In order to keep a low profile, the eighteen wheeler is painted with a mural of a masked bandit robbing a stagecoach.
• Jerry Reed sings his hit song, “East Bound and Down”
• Hillarity insues

Sounds ridiculous right?  Well, it does lack the realism of “Die Hard”, but it is actually not a bad movie provided that:

1. You are a guy
2. When you watch a movie you want to be entertained and don’t question things too much.

But the point here is that history was changed:

• The mystique of Coors beer was further boosted to those who could not get it East of Texas.  Here I need to emphasize that people thought it was really illegal to take Coors beer East of Texas.
• The Trans-Am became as cool as the (then recently jailed) Evel Knievel with suburban pre-teens across America.
• Jerry Reed had a hit single.

As much as I love old Trans-Ams, and that song, what I want to focus on is the first item in that list: People believed that it was illegal to take Coors beer East of Texas.  This is one of the standout facts people in the United States know about Coors beer.  What they do not know is this: in 1959 Coors was the first beverage in America to be packaged in a two-piece aluminum can.  These cans are a part of common life today.  There are two on my desk right this minute (diet soda, not beer).  They are so common place people my age really cannot picture a world without them.  A world where I am told you had to use a can opener (one of the pointy triangluar ones, not the rotating ones with a blade) simply to drink a beverage.  I imagine the people at The Coors Brewing Company of of Golden, Colorado are proud of having introduce this convenient, and recyclable, can.  But far more people remember that it was illegal to ship Coors beer East of Texas (and when I say “far more people”, I  mean “me”).

What could this possibly have to do with software development?  It can be difficult to figure out what people will latch onto.  In my tenure at SlickEdit, I have seen a lot of sleep lost over features that did not make quite the splash we hoped they would.  Thankfully none of these turned out to be as big a blunder as the Edsel.  I will share the one that personally hit me the hardest though:

1. Launch SlickEdit’s DIFFzilla® setup dialog (Tools>File Difference)
2. Fill in “Path 1″ and “Path 2″ with any two files that SlickEdit tags
3. Click the “Symbols” radio button at the top left



4. Clicking OK will yield output that actually show changes on a symbol level, including modified functions and added/deleted functions.



5. Selecting an item from this list and clicking “Diff” will actually compare just those two functions in the DIFFzilla output dialog.

This can be convenient for a number of reasons.  Sometimes a function moved, and the file itself has changed so much diffing two whole files just confuses matters.  This feature will shine in those cases.

I thought this would be a hit.  Everybody here thought it was a neat idea, and I worked feverishly to sneak this into the 8.0 release.  It was not a hit.  In fact, I am not certain that a user has ever actually used this feature.  It is generally good for a “wow” or two at a trade show though.

The moral of the story?  Be careful when you choose to add features.  The two-piece aluminum can may not look nearly as flashy as a 1977 Trans-Am, but people will still be using it 50 years later.