Our customers at my real job are clamoring about Droid and IPhone apps. Unfortunately, they see these new devices and that they can connect to the Internet and decide they would like their Windows Apps to run on them. Well we do support Windows CE and you can run your programs on those devices (we have a thin client product) but your standard business form is a tad bit larger that will work comfortably on those small screens. To believe that we're going to provide them a complete "magic" solution to their customer requests for portable device support is not realistic. Sometimes I think we're all too quick to try to respond to someone's incomplete thought processes. (Crap, sounds like I'm being political doesn't it?)

Thus the "In the mean time, what kind of functionality would you be looking for from an app?" question was right on target. Bull's eye! Notice the defending sound of responses coming back?

When I did performance tuning in the old days, my first question to someone that said their system was slow and wanted it to go faster was "What do you consider to be acceptable performance?". Once upon arriving at H.R Donnelly and Company (yellow pages) in Terre Haute, Indiana (in the middle of winter), the response was "sub second". This was on a networked system with 9600 baud terminals. When the customer said that I closed my briefcase and stood up to leave. He asked where I was going and I said "Back to Dallas. I'll never be able to achieve a sub second response time with this configuration." After a bit more discussion, he decided two seconds would be acceptable. I found a way to accommodate that.

The moral to the story is to begin as Al did by setting realistic expectations.