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A reality check please!
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Posted by Jack Crawford
Mar 6, 2007 at 01:22 AM
I’m surprised at these endless discussions about ADM and the internal workings of the company behind it. May I respectfully suggest that people accept the situation for what it obviously is ... and move on.
Commercial software is replete with risks and disappointments. As others have commented here, many are small scale operations and if sales aren’t buoyant, the business withers and/or dies. If the enterprise is successful, the opposite thing often happens - the company merges or gets bought out by one of the big boys.
After years of loyalty to Mijenix (the makers of Power Desk, Zip magic et al), I saw the company sell off its products and morph into something else. Devotees of Ecco Pro have their own story to tell. I vowed long ago not to be totally dependent on a particular product and certainly not to let misplaced loyalty blind me to the realities of the commercial world.
Many of the products we discuss here from our narrow user perspective are only a tool in a bigger business market to their makers. Inspiration is in the education market, Casesoft the legal market, Sycon the knowledge management and QA markets, MS world domination
etc etc etc.
After years of avoiding MS like the plague, I recently migrated back to IE7 and OneNote. I have no loyalty whatsoever to Microsoft, but OneNote is a superb, ground breaking product which matches my needs better than anything else I’ve seen. In 5 years time, I may well be using something else so I will make sure I don’t get trapped in a particular format and that my data is portable.
At the risk of sounding egotistic, testing and using software is about the ability of the vendor to meet MY needs as the customer, not the other way round. We all want to be loyal, but in this game you have to think of yourself first. Otherwise you end up feeling betrayed and ripped off. I think we all have better things to do than cry over spilt milk.
[small rant ends]
Jack
Posted by Jan Rifkinson
Mar 6, 2007 at 01:55 AM
Jack Crawford wrote:
>I’m surprised at these endless discussions about ADM and the internal workings of the
>company behind it. May I respectfully suggest that people accept the situation for
>what it obviously is ... and move on.[snip]
Jack you may be right about moving on but isn’t that what topics are for, i.e. if you are interested in a topic you follow it & if you’re not, you don’t.
—
Jan Rifkinson
Ridgefield, CT USA
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Mar 6, 2007 at 09:16 PM
Jack Crawford wrote:
>
>At the risk of sounding egotistic, testing and
>using software is about the ability of the vendor to meet MY needs as the customer, not
>the other way round. We all want to be loyal, but in this game you have to think of
>yourself first. Otherwise you end up feeling betrayed and ripped off. I think we all
>have better things to do than cry over spilt milk.
Jack,
ADM is not a symbol for the inevitable disappointments in software development. I’m sure there is enough of that, enough that one wants to hope that the inevitable is not compounded by the fraudulent. Jan, for example, is now absolutely correct that the suppression of discussion and criticism is a sure sign of problems far worse than bad luck or a bad temper. Any software forum hosted by a developer who censors posts for contents is disrespectful of its customers
to give an unrelated example. The smart and honest developer welcomes discussion of competing products, for example, because he thinks his product will benefit from the comparison and because he wants to know about what others are doing. He can recognize services users are actually providing gratis, and take the benefit, instead of interposing his ego and taking offense. Or, lacking confidence in his own product, striving to shield his customers from persuasion by users of competing products.Unfortunately, where a developer is psychopathic, self-selected users become the developer’s hit men in such forums. Their fanatacism about the product is NOT the result of self-sacrifice to the developer. They have some kind of ego stake in the product—its functioning has come to represent their own.
Anyway, we agree about OneNote.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 6, 2007 at 11:10 PM
Jack,
I’m sure you are right that we are beating this topic into the ground, but ranting about the bad behavior of a software developer to sympathetic people is somewhat therapeutic… Also, there are lessons to be learned from this experience. From the user’s point of view, we can learn some of the warning signs that a developer is likely to take the money and run.
But I say, if you need to rant, this is a good place to do it.
Steve Z.