> You consider Altium to have great support. Would you rather work with a > company that has a large number of customers enthusiastic about its > great customer support, or one whose customer support quality is unknown > because no one ever needs to use the customer support? In other words, > having a reputation for having great customer support is a serious check > mark against the quality of the company's product.
I agree to some extent. Along those lines of thought, the best warranty is to have a product so good there is no need to use the warranty. Oh wait, we are talking about software here, why am I going on about warranties when there are none...
Best regards, Ivan Baggett Bagotronix Inc. website: www.bagotronix.com
Hamid A. Wasti wrote:
Brad Velander wrote:
My comments about the support of the core tools is based upon what I am seeing recently on the DXP forum. Their support people seem to be keyed on supporting and improving the core tools, along with the other tools as well. Even rather special circumstances are getting attention and not just the usual, "Well it was not meant/intended to work that way....".I have been monitoring that list for the last few weeks when I started a project in DXP/2004. After a couple of days of mostly doing schematics and simulation, I decided to once again pass on DXP/2004 and stick with 99SE for the schematic/layout because I felt it was a better package overall.
Back to the point. Yes, Altium does seem to answer questions on that list, but that does not say much. What have they done to actually improve the PCB and SCH? Yes, they have made plenty of changes, but every change is not automatically an improvement -- many changes are useless fluff while many others actually make the software less useable. Altium's main focus now is the FPGA stuff. They want to produce a software that does everything even though it does nothing well. Having a common user interface between all the different things means that the interface is not optimized for anything. As they delve deeper and deeper into the FPGA area, they will necessarily need to nutter the PCB and SCH in order to maintain uniformity across the product line. In the end, the PCB and SCH will get so cumbersome that in real performance it will be at the level of a $1,000 packages. Sure you are paying $11K for the product, but you are getting only $1K worth of what you want and $10K of junk that you neither need nor will ever use.
That is why, like you, I am in the market for something better. The problem is that I have not yet found anything that is better than 99SE for most of the stuff I do.
Let me leave you with one final thought about Altium's customer support. You consider Altium to have great support. Would you rather work with a company that has a large number of customers enthusiastic about its great customer support, or one whose customer support quality is unknown because no one ever needs to use the customer support? In other words, having a reputation for having great customer support is a serious check mark against the quality of the company's product.
Regards,
Hamid
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