File this one under "product management peeves" next to venga-ization.
Michael Kaplan writes about his early adventures supporting different layout directions for writing. He starts out with very real needs to support bidirectional writing systems and voluntarily added several others (boustrophedon and the various vertical writing systems). When done and asked "What languages does it support?" he accurately replied "It'll support anything but Rongo-Rongo". I leave as an exercise to the reader what showed up in the next version of the requirements. I dare you to tell me this hasn't happened to you - and why? Because it's harder to figure out what users actually need than to just ask for "more, more!". I'm looking forward to referencing Ogham and Mayan as missing features the next time I'm faced with this kind of nincompoopery.
Technorati Tags: nincompoopery, Product Management
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