Delrina Fax was not a port of the Windows app, it was developed for the Apple zealots. Features, manuals, demos, ads, pretty much all of the product was tailored for the Mac audience which was large in the “graphics/publishing ghetto” and an audience that had a large portion of female users. Our demo was to fax a famous painting (at least I think as I am no art expert) of a young girl in her Sunday dress in a nice summer scene in full grayscale that appealed to graphics folks and to people of the fairer sex. We compared it to the output from Winfax and our mac competitors and said which painting would you buy. Do you want to fax your work and have it look like Delrina-fax output or the other software. Worked well with our audience. Our other test was a picture of a Mariah carey showing some cleavage which would have worked better than a painting if our audience was mainly in prison.

I would argue that customer-centricity is what is lost in the PC software of the 2000s whether out of Redmond or Cupertino and is better illustrated by websites such as Facebook, Myspace or Youtube. One only has to look at Vista and office 2007 to see the lack of customer-centricity.

Delrina Fax also is an example of a project that was not driven by marketing. Delrina Fax was a success and it was not driven by marketing who are supposed to be the only folks who understand the market. Saeed shows that in some cases marketing can be a detriment. Marketing folks need to understand the benefits of educating the full team.

The Mac product was a Skunkworks project and like any project, everyone will have a perspective and a memory of a project, however one thing I will agree with Steve Johnson on and I am sure all will agree, we could not have made this up. The other take home is everyone on a project needs to know the customer, the market and the role of the product.

Michael

I do know that by the time we got to market – Delrina Fax Pro was a Mac product with the look and feel of a Mac product. The fact that there were bumps and crashes along the way in no way diminishes the hard work or the sense of satisfaction that we all shared.

Thanks for the detailed comment. I’ll reply in kind.

Clearly you had quite an emotional stake in Delrina. I’m sure it was a wild ride for those at Delrina, both the ups, and the downs, given the impact of Win95, the layoffs and lawsuits that occurred there in the mid 1990s.

To correct one of your points…my tenure at Delrina was not “long before Delrina Fax Pro actually shipped.” Given that I know precisely when I left and that I completed the documentation project and was there when the product went RTM, it could hardly be called “long before” the product shipped.

Thanks for giving me credit for the docs. There were people internal to Delrina who reviewed it certainly, (Vicki who posted a comment was one of them) so it was not 100% a solo effort, but it was my primary deliverable and focus in my time there. I also wrote the balloon help, did a UI review and provided suggestions to improve the usability. An axiom from my tech writing days: If it’s difficult to document, it’s difficult to use.

Also, thanks for verifying the fact that at the time, there was little if any Macintosh domain knowledge in the company. Others as well, not simply the PM, had decided that WinFax Mac was to be the original product name. The “wiser heads” you mention were the beta customers who gave negative feedback on the name and thus prompted the search for another name. This despite protestations from those few inside the company who were actually Mac savvy, when WinFax Mac was originally proposed.

In those days, for any company to have to wait for beta testers to tell them that Win-anything Mac was not a suitable name for a product, indicates a clear gap in basic domain understanding, which was the whole point of the blog posting.

Bringing in “domain knowledge” after the fact would be the correct thing to do, and as you state, that’s what Delrina did. Had that knowledge been there earlier, who knows what decisions would have been made. The original plan had been to create an entire product line for the Macintosh, not simply a single fax product. What happened to that vision? It never materialized.

In fact, after Fax Pro was released, Delrina invested in what they knew best — Windows software. They released WinComm as a standalone product in 1994, WinFax Scanner in 1994, Cyberjack (a Web browser, ftp client and Usenet reader) for Win95 in 1995, and a full communications suite (CommSuite) for Windows, also in late 1995. This suite included TalkWorks, a Windows product based on technology Delrina acquired earlier.

There were no other Macintosh communications products released by Delrina in that time. I wonder why, given the “exponential growth of Delrina’s Mac team” during that period.

BTW, WRT the product and awards, I never made any aspersions against the product itself if you read what I wrote. I worked closely with the development team and Don and Mike certainly knew what they were doing.

In fact, those who were closest to the actual product, myself included, knew that it had some functional superiority to other products. The grey scale sample image in the original manual was taken from one of my own photographs. But functionality and awards don’t always win markets.

In the end, the question comes down to business success. Was the product ultimately financially successful? If it was, and I don’t have data one way or another, it’s interesting that Symantec wasn’t interested. Also, why didn’t Delrina release other Macintosh communication products? Instead they focused on the core Windows business, and then dabbled in screen savers (Dilbert, Bill & Opus), and electronic scrapbook software (Echo Lake).

Regardless, thanks for reading the blog, and posting the comment. Constructive comments and clarifications are always welcome. And after 14 years, which in technology is like a few generations in human terms, there will always be several sides to each story.

Saeed

Delrina Fax Pro was indeed a late entrant into a Mac fax market that was dominated by the DoveFax and Global Village products. However, those bundled hardware/software products suffered two serious weaknesses: their bundled fax software was notoriously unreliable and delivered mediocre quality fax output. In contrast, Delrina Fax Pro was rock-solid reliable and was the only fax software capable of sending ultra high quality “grayscale” faxes—a key feature immediately popular with the Mac graphics crowd. Discontented DoveFax and Global Village users seeking a reliable fax software alternative also discovered that Delrina’s Mac tech support was fast, informed, and friendly. And I must commend the author for creating the top-quality documentation that got a “4 out of 5″ for Delrina Fax Pro in that MacUser magazine review.

Claiming that Delrina lacked “real domain knowledge or true understanding of the market they were entering” makes for an entertaining case study conclusion almost a dozen years later—but it’s not true. Yes, a WinFax product manager wanted to name the Mac product “WinFax Mac,” but wiser heads prevailed. Yes, Delrina had earlier hoped for OEM bundles with Mac faxmodem makers, but Delrina’s leadership was fully aware that the OEM window of opportunity had closed. A better conclusion grants Delrina some credit for intelligence, and makes the case that Delrina accurately assessed the Mac market at that time.

Sales were slowing and margins dropping on faxmodems with bundled “lite” fax software in both the Windows and Mac markets. Conversely, there seemed to be a real market opportunity for feature-rich, high-margin standalone fax software. The success of WinFax Pro proved this proposition in the Windows market, and Delrina reasoned that the Mac market was also ripe for a Mac equivalent to WinFax Pro. Delrina never “misunderstood the dynamics of the Macintosh fax market.” Delrina Fax Pro was an calculated attempt to enter a new market category dominated by no single player, get in quickly with a feature-rich product that defines the category, influence the key Mac influencers and win decisive reviews to win mindshare dominance, ensure that the product was advertised and available in every single Mac sales channel, and employ every trick in the book to promote sell-through.

Unfortunately, the terms of the Symantec acquisition didn’t allow Delrina to continue this foray into the Mac fax software market. In fact, the Symantec acquisition of Delrina was the high-water mark of the entire PC fax market, eclipsed shortly afterward by the popularity of Internet-based email. The author says, “Even back then, early in my career, I could see the dark days ahead if I stayed at Delrina.” Too bad he didn’t stick around, because all of us at Delrina enjoyed a wild ride while it lasted—and had a heck of a good time!