Ron, I simply could not resist to reply to some of Your thoughts. 2012/8/5 Ron Ginger <rongin...@roadrunner.com>: > > Mach is approaching 50,000 units sold.
Over how long period of time? Most probably - years, since it has been released. LinuxCNC also has been downloaded for thousands of times over last years. And selling Mach licence to OEM does not mean anything to me - in less than a year since I am working with cnc machines, I already have retrofitted 2 machines with Mach for 2 different clients (and one more retrofit for yet another customer is in negotiation) to LinuxCNC, because they are having reliability and stability issues with Mach. All of those customers are manufacturing companies (one of them with annual turnover over 40M EUR, do not know about the rest), so machines are far from "hobby use". > They have work to do and dont sit around and post > on mail lists or chat rooms. So do You admit the lack of customer support and lots of issues to be solved? It seems that You confirm my observation that all they care is attracting new clients instead of working with their existing customers, thus increasing customer loyalty and generating revenues from repeated sales. > And these numbers are based on dollars > spent, not surverys of mail lists. Ok, dollars spent is an absolute number that can be measured and compared, thus normally it is valid way to measure market share. Except one small and insignificant detail - LinuxCNC is available for free, so based on Your logic, LinuxCNC has 0% market share :)) So You have to do something else - surveys on mailing list or whatever, to assess actual situation. >> They have been working on Mach4 for a very long time (4 years??) and now >> they are clearly in a game of catchup. > > Mach4, as it will ship, has only been underway since the first of this > year, and was demoed at the CNC workshop in June. It is intended the > first version, Mach-lite, will ship in September. I am working on the > Newfangled wizards for it and they are nearly ready. Hmm, yes, Andy asked very good question - what happened in those 3 years in-between? Obviously they were not focused on support of existing customers in forums, emails or chat or fixing whatever bugs there are in the app. > All work is being done with cross platform tools, and OEM versions will > be offered on linux and Mac. That was also shown at the workshop. Next > chance to see it will be IMTS in September. Wonderful news for LinuxCNC community - having Mach on Linux will attract more CAD and CAM applications - my experience shows that it is one of the main points mentioned, when asked, why would they choose/ not choose LinuxCNC. Of course, there are solutions available, but people are not aware of them. This step will also tell potential audience that not only windows, but also Linux can be used for CNC applications. And now guess, what will be in the first lines, when somebody will search the web for keywords "linux" and "cnc"? > That can only be labeled bullshit. There are many hardware vendors, all > doing quite well selling their products with Mach. Some are selling more > in a month that messa is selling in a year. Again, they are out there > doing business, not chatting on mail lists. The fact that vendor is providing some hardware for Mach and opinion of particular vendor about the application might have very little correlation. It does not necessarily mean that they are happy with it. Has anyone ever asked them, what do they actually feel about Mach? I am sure that they would appreciate availability of source code to better understand, how that app works and so that they can better design their hardware and prepare better drivers/firmware. Actually that large number of vendors means that there are lots of unsatisfied needs for the customers that these vendors are trying to satisfy. IMHO this fact tells that Mach itself has lots of issues and hardware vendors are trying to solve/workaround them in their hardware/firmware. -- Viesturs If you can't fix it, you don't own it. http://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
