At 11:43 PM 6/11/01 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Thanks also for your detailed explanation. As usual, this list knows more
>about Protel than Protel does!
It is fairly normal for a thousand people involved with a piece of
software, collectively, to know more than any single individual, even if
that individual works for the company that designed the software. We
especially are more likely to know about workarounds, but we may also be
better able to explain things, having stumbled over them ourselves. We also
have many, many more hours in the day. Not individually -- company support
people may be working full-time -- but collectively.
We are not being paid directly to provide support, which puts a damper on
it, but that inhibition is swamped by the power of numbers. And there are
indirect benefits to writing for some of us. For example, if a reader wants
to be talked through a problem, I'm available. But I'll charge for it.
Those of us who run service bureaus gain referrals, etc.
I do think mutual user support is the way of the future, at least with
complex software such as Protel. I note that Cadence seems to be moving in
that direction. Ideal, of course, would be some combination and better
cooperation.
Protel could designate, for example, one or a few support engineers to
actively participate in this list. There are reasons why they don't do
that, but some of those reasons, at least, are obsolete. Company
representatives on a list like that tend to attract a lot of flack, they
will be blamed for anything and everything, but that can be controlled
through list rules and policies, one of which would be that the company
reps would not attempt to defend the company on the list, leaving that to
the rest of us. And if none of us want to defend the company on a point,
perhaps the company should look closely at that point!
We do have Protel CSC, but CSC writes only infrequently; usually when some
issue has arisen for which they have an answer and none of the rest of us
have supplied it. That's efficient -- and we like for Protel to be
efficient, since it keeps costs down -- but efficiency is not everything.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Abdulrahman Lomax
P.O. Box 690
El Verano, CA 95433
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