At the finish line

(Beware, this is long.)

When we started doing refactoring, which is the main topic of memoQ 6, and the only topic that we communicated for long, the majority of the company could identify themselves with it. I probably was the person with the least buy-in. I knew it had to be done, but choosing this as a story we are selling seemed to be strange.

There were two reasons why I found this strange:

• First, from day one we were selling features which we turned into benefits afterwards. Our first users, real geeks mostly, requested us to deliver certain functionality, whereas since version 4 we mostly sold concepts - concepts like resources, LiveDocs, versioning, online projects with desktop documents, i.e. full synchronization of servers, etc. These all have an immediate impact on the user. Why would you pay for something that is just a bit faster but doesn't do much else to you? (For example this held me back from upgrading VMware Fusion on my Mac for a long time. The upgrade was expensive compared to the purchase price and between versions 3 and 4 there wasn't anything particularly attractive among the new features.) 
• Second, refactoring is a process, not a product. All the features and concepts enrich the product, but refactoring is about improving the product rather than making it different, making it better. 

And there was a third reason: I wasn't sure about the success of this effort. Maybe it's not very appropriate to write down in a public blog that I questioned the abilities of our acclaimed developers, but I was really afraid that the scope is not defined properly, and that this effort will never calm down.

So now for the first time you will hear me say I'm excited about a new release. I know that this is just yet another way to say I'm happy or I'm delighted in English, but whenever someone writes they are excited about the release of their new software that supports yet another new file format, I just smile. I imagine the person trembling and shaking in excitement, biting the nails, and then I see the tool that introduced the 11th file format after 10 others. Honestly I haven't really been excited about most of our releases - if we do our job right, the market will appreciate it -, but this time I am, in the nail-biting sense.

I am excited because I personally see a lot of improvements. I see memoQ starting up in 9 seconds on my virtual machine where it took about 25 seconds earlier, I see it import the same files in 7 minutes that imported in over 40 minutes earlier, I see that adding a new file or removing an old one when you have 200 others is taking a small fraction of the time it took earlier, I see that the concordance improved very dramatically in retrieval and has a much higher recall but does not take any longer, etc. I also see that it is not as unstable - at least on the client side, I mostly tested that - as I would expect it to be. I see that despite the massive efforts that went into redeveloping the code, the functions that used to work still work. But I am also excited because I know that no matter how many testing teams we have working on quality assurance (we currently work with two external teams plus the internal testing), some of the real-life issues will only surface when it is out in the wild. I don't know at this point whether memoQ will really solve all the problems (okay, I know, I should use the word issues) that our largest users experienced at times, I don't know if the new architecture will really allow us to fix any kind of an issue, no matter its nature (in memoQ 5 and earlier versions there were certain boundaries that triggered the gearing up of memoQ), and I don't know how quickly server users will have the courage to upgrade. I also don't know exactly how memoQ 6's better reliability will affect translators working remotely against servers. Probably they will not experience server downtimes and timeouts and slowdowns, but only time will tell.

Because we wanted to make sure there is big value for everyone (we want to earn upgrades rather than force them), memoQ 6 gets some very significant new features as well - more on them later -, but I have to confess that some of the features that go now into the translator pro version have existed before, but were only available for server users. However, this does not decrease their value: who wouldn't want such a simple project management that you just drop a file into a folder, and the tool does the rest for you? Or who wouldn't want a way to reliably compare two files, and have a table to show the differences? I've seen many comparison tools, but compared to memoQ, they only worked on a small number of file formats.

We are getting there, and while the last touches are still being made in the code, we are soon to start the public testing. We will start with the client first (both translator pro and project manager editions), most probably during the next week, and move on to the server around 25 June. So we're on track, and I'm very happy about this - thanks to all our development, planning and testing teams who contributed, and thanks to everybody else in the company who managed to keep their enthusiasm despite the release that is taking the longest ever. Almost a full year has passed since memoQ 5 - I remember demoing it at Localization World in Barcelona first, and actually Localization World Paris is happening as I write. But seeing the results of the long work I'm positive that this will be another great release.

(By the way, you may want to read Kevin Lossner's description of memoQ 6 features.)