This is pretty damning commentary. And maybe a bit 'rash'...What exactly do you mean by calling the commentary "rash" ?
And why did we reject the idea? I can not speak for you, but I can speak for myself. There were two reasons. First, when I bought 99SE, it came with support included in the price I paid for it. For them to all of sudden decide that they were going to renege on it is a violation of the contract and I would not stand for it on principle. Secondly, I might have been convinced to go along with the change because of changing business climate. However, the problem for Altium was that I had been occasionally calling the support hotline and knew that there was not much support there. I am certainly not going to pay for something if I was not going to receive any value or frequently receive wrong answers. Maybe other people refused to go along for other reasons, but this was my reasoning. Their attitude of "We have great news for you. We have decided to upgrade our service, so the same quality service that you were promised for free, you now get to pay for" did not go over well either.Logically, their business model tried to change awhile back... they tried to introduce a system whereby support services would be the revenue stream to replace new sales of PCB software here in the U.S..... Protel failed to make that happen... we as a body rejected the idea.
Altium's main market is people who have never heard of Protel before. I doubt they are getting much repeat business. It is hard to translate sayings into other languages, but here's one that bears a lot on Altium's situation for the last 5 or so years: Being bad is OK, having a bad reputation is what is really bad. Altium has acquired a very bad reputation among its users because of poor and short sighted management and now it is finding it hard to get any support from the user base. That may be its undoing.I think Protel has a market... it's guys and gals like us that are willing to hold on... but nobody can continue to wait forever.
Hamid
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