Delivering the Bad News

It’s a Friday, the day governments & companies traditionally deliver bad news. I recived the bad news earlier in the week, but I’m passing it on now:

The Standard is dead.

Let me first say, a couple of authors are right in the middle of finishing up articles. Those will be completed and published and you’ll get paid.

Andy sums up some of the reasons why the Standard failed very nicely in his blog post. I agree with them, if not where the responsibility lies. Andy takes most of it on himself because, well, he’s that kind of guy, may the gods bless him. But, the fact is, I took on the job and just wasn’t prepared for what it would entail. The “editing” part of the job was hard. If you think it’s easy to tell people, “No, we’re not going to make you famous and give you $500,” think again. It was tough. But, actually, that was the easier part of what was needed.

The real difficulties were two-fold. First, pushing the documents through the pipeline. Frankly, that was a pain. Sometimes, I was the bottleneck, sometimes it was other people. But it required a great deal of attention and diligence and I wasn’t always giving it my all. Second, and this is the biggie, it really needed to be marketed, constantly, and widely. It needed to be up in people’s faces, all the time. I needed to be the one pushing that, hard. I blogged about it occasionally and I tweeted about it a few more times, but, here again, I didn’t give it the real attention it needed.

Yeah, I’ve got excuses for the shortcomings, some are valid, some aren’t. I’m not going to bother with them because frankly, they only really matter to me and Andy. Suffice to say, I did the job I could do and it wasn’t adequate.

So, the SQL Server Standard is dead, again. I think that makes it’s third death, depending on how you count them. Who knows, the thing keeps coming back like Dracula in the old Hammer films, we could see it again.

Thanks to everyone who wrote for it. Thank you, the few people who clicked through and logged in to get the chance to read it. Thanks to all the editors and photographers and everyone else involved. Thanks, a lot, for magnificent work as the head technical editor, to Brad McGehee (blog|twitter). Thanks, most of all, to Andy Warren (blog|twitter) for giving me the opportunity. Sorry I dropped the ball on this.