Hey, we've been through this before. It always gets both sides stirred up.
In the holiday spirit, perhaps we could come up with a Letterman Top Ten Reasons why Panasonic doesn't allow end users any software tools. 10) Condescension. Panasonic regards its customers as ignorami, more likely to crash the system than enhance it. Yet at the same time, adds so many end-user features an IQ of 120 needed to use half of them. 9) Needs the support of a dealer network to sell the higher end units; such support likely to evaporate if units sold on eBay stores. 8) By selling through fewer authorized channels, able to keep profit margin higher. 7) Not enough competition from Taiwan, China, Korea at this point. 6) IP phones will be eventually almost ENTIRELY software driven. Don't want to get in the habit of giving away the family jewels for free. Hard to police this if it gets into BitTorrent. 5) Snob factor. Only low-end units would give away the software to users. 4) Great profit margins giving the exact same certification classes over, and over, and over. Easy money extracted from a gullible dealer network. 3) T Shirt: "Somebody I loved went to California for Panasonic Certification Classes - and all I got was this lousy T-shirt and a Programming CD-ROM" . 2) Dealers and Techs now become "The waitress with the rolls". (i.e. gotta kiss butt or else you get no rolls.) 1) Detached executives in Japan who are clueless. Their policies will lead to their products becoming "unsold Christmas cake". (A Japanese idiom that loosely translates to the English equivalent of "an old maid".) During the initial heated discussion about these Panasonic policies, I was constructing a large medical office building for 40 doctors. I was so turned off, we bought an off-brand box labeled T-O-S-H-I-B-A. Panasonic, time to wake up and smell the coffee. My feet and checkbook voted. Monopoly ??? What monopoly ??? Merry Christmas everyone! William Biggs _________________________________________________________________ KX-T Mailing list --- http://kxthelp.com/ Subscription changes: http://kxthelp.com/mailman/listinfo/kxt
