I recently put in a lot of hours for a software system to be able to handle webp just as well as every other image format it already accepted. I put in a lot of work as well. Hadn’t heard about it for a while, but saw the feature release statement for the new version I knew my changes were in. It wasn’t on there.
So I reached out to my contact and asked if there was an issue or did it get bumped to a later version or what? So she told me the marketing team that do the release statements decided not to include it. They stated for one, people already expect common formats to be handled. Saying you now handle a format looks bad, since people know you didn’t handle it before and were behind the curve. The second (probably more important) reason was nobody knew what webp even was and it’s only something technical people care about (they probably said nerds, but my contact translated). So no regular customer would be interested and it could only lead to confusion and questions.
I hope somebody is happy with the work I put in tho. Somebody is going to drag a webp into the system and have it be accepted. Someday… I hope…
Fuck those people for telling you this after you did the work
Those reasons are hard-stop stupid. If they REALLY cared about the marketing they’d release it silently or add a “improvements to image format handling” line and leave it at that.
I will second the suggestion at something like “expanded support for more image formats”. One of my responsibilities is rolling the development log into customer release notes and I agree with the “changes that highlight a previous shortcoming can look bad”, and make accommodations for that all the time. I also try to make sure every developer that contributed can recognize their work in the release notes.
“Expanded image format support” seems like something that if a customer hasn’t noticed, they would assume “oh they must have some customer with a weird proprietary format that they added but have to be vague about”. If it were related to customer requests, I would email the specific customers highlighting their need for webp is addressed after pushing the release notes
Maybe I worded it incorrectly. The feature was released in that version. They just didn’t mention it in the release statement they put out to there customers. I’m sure there’s some changelog somewhere people can dig into where it says something like what you mentioned. Or it can just be under “Various small improvements” which they always add as a catch-all.
So I’m happy, I did the job and got paid. Everyone I worked with was happy. And the feature got released. It’s was just a let down it didn’t get mentioned at all, even though I put quite a lot of work into it.
I hope somebody is happy with the work I put in tho. Somebody is going to drag a webp into the system and have it be accepted.
And that was me! I mean, not with your software but with someone else’s years ago. Still, in a weird anachronistic karma sort of way, thank you for caring.
I recently put in a lot of hours for a software system to be able to handle webp just as well as every other image format it already accepted. I put in a lot of work as well. Hadn’t heard about it for a while, but saw the feature release statement for the new version I knew my changes were in. It wasn’t on there. So I reached out to my contact and asked if there was an issue or did it get bumped to a later version or what? So she told me the marketing team that do the release statements decided not to include it. They stated for one, people already expect common formats to be handled. Saying you now handle a format looks bad, since people know you didn’t handle it before and were behind the curve. The second (probably more important) reason was nobody knew what webp even was and it’s only something technical people care about (they probably said nerds, but my contact translated). So no regular customer would be interested and it could only lead to confusion and questions.
I hope somebody is happy with the work I put in tho. Somebody is going to drag a webp into the system and have it be accepted. Someday… I hope…
a bit related.
Was working for a comparison engine. Back in the day things where slow. But i made it lightning fast. Pretty proud.
Untill a few weeks later the manager comes up, and tells me to make it SLOWER!
apparently users thought it was suss that it was so fast and the results therefore where fake…
Let me introduce you to good old speed up loops.
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop
The only ones reading the changelog are nerds anyway
That marketing team is a bunch of absolute morons. Handling Webp would have made the comapny trendsetters.
I will second the suggestion at something like “expanded support for more image formats”. One of my responsibilities is rolling the development log into customer release notes and I agree with the “changes that highlight a previous shortcoming can look bad”, and make accommodations for that all the time. I also try to make sure every developer that contributed can recognize their work in the release notes.
“Expanded image format support” seems like something that if a customer hasn’t noticed, they would assume “oh they must have some customer with a weird proprietary format that they added but have to be vague about”. If it were related to customer requests, I would email the specific customers highlighting their need for webp is addressed after pushing the release notes
Maybe I worded it incorrectly. The feature was released in that version. They just didn’t mention it in the release statement they put out to there customers. I’m sure there’s some changelog somewhere people can dig into where it says something like what you mentioned. Or it can just be under “Various small improvements” which they always add as a catch-all.
So I’m happy, I did the job and got paid. Everyone I worked with was happy. And the feature got released. It’s was just a let down it didn’t get mentioned at all, even though I put quite a lot of work into it.
And that was me! I mean, not with your software but with someone else’s years ago. Still, in a weird anachronistic karma sort of way, thank you for caring.
I appreciate it! Thank you