QuickVerse 4.0

Never Released!

In 1995 we violated the principle learned by the MoneyCounts 7 team: Never do the shirts before you release the product!

In 1995 we were feeling the pressure of needing to expand the QuickVerse family beyond Bibles and a handful of reference books. Logos was promoting the "library" concept in version 2.0 of the Logos Library System, and we launched the STEP initiative both in response to Logos but more importantly as a codification of our existing strategy to bring hundreds of books into QuickVerse.

Logos had been promising version 2.0 for months. To compete, we planned to create a stand-alone program called QuickVerse Library that would be a stop-gap measure to bring a multitude of reference books to QuickVerse, then re-write QuickVerse based on the QuickVerse Library code to create one product (QuickVerse 4) that would include both Bibles (in the new STEP format) and reference books.

We had allocated three or four programmers to a core design team working on QuickVerse 4 issues while the majority of programmers worked on QuickVerse Library. As we got into the design effort and as Logos continued to slip its schedule, it occurred to us that there was a chance we'd actually start and ship QuickVerse 4 before Logos finished LLS 2.0.

This race (of which Logos was unaware) made for good motivation for the team, so we issued QuickVerse 4 Design Team polos (above) and QuickVerse 4 "Running the Race" t-shirts to the entire staff. We took the theme from Hebrews 12:1, and put that verse on the back of the t-shirts (which also made them great jogging shirts).

Logos shipped LLS 2.0 in August. We got to the point where we had designed the living daylights out of QuickVerse 4 while QuickVerse Library was languishing. So we put everyone on QuickVerse Library and set the work on QuickVerse 4 aside.

In March 1996 Bob Parsons insisted we ship an update to QuickVerse despite the fact we had shipped multiple content upgrades since QuickVerse 3. The problem was there was no way we were going to get our planned QuickVerse 4 out the door in his timeframe (three months).

Jeff Wheeler, Project Manager for QuickVerse solved the problem. He proposed that he take the QuickVerse 3.0 code home for three months and come back with an update that included a half dozen often requested features, including some flashy stuff like color highlighting that would look good on the marketing pieces.

So the version of QuickVerse 4 that shipped was really "3.5" and the design work that went into what we thought would be version 4 was delayed until version 5. This introduced a problem obvious to our customers: Version 5 had little or none of the version 4 features. That's because the design was based on version 3, and many of the things we did in 4 were not easily replicated in version 5.