Without such 'whining' as you call it we probably wouldn't have the new
Rev UI for Metacard as it took a considerable amount of whining just to
get certain people to accept that there were serious shortcomings to the
original product's interface.
Contentment and passive acceptance tend not to be compelling impetus to
improve anything.
>From Day 1 (or, at least, fairly early on) there have been 2 main streams
of discontent: it had an awful interface and it cost too much. Now it's
50% better along those lines thanks to world-class whiners leading to the
involvement of the Rev team.
But cost is still an issue. Everyone's been asked to 'see' that the
company cannot afford to offer the product for less. What others wish
not to see is that many users cannot justify a $900 replacement for a
$100 tool. They may well bite the bullet and swallow a $350 replacement
for a $100 tool but find it goes down with great bitter taste to realize
that the expenditure does not cover incremental upgrades or tech support.
I'm aware that it does maybe 100 new things that the $100 tool does not,
but there will be those users (maybe alot, maybe not) who only have need
for, say, 10 of those things, which for them will not justify the
additional expense.
This next semester I could add another 25 licenses to the bottom line.
Then, for that semester and every succeeding semester of use, I could add
another 35 or so licenses (for the students who wish to use the product at
home). Multiply this by every instructor like me and then realize that
this isn't going to happen at the current cost. At best, you'll get a lot
of pirated copies. At worst, I'll end up going with an OSX-native
Supercard because at least it's affordable and will likely do most of what
I/we need it to do.
If we're not your market, then just tell us and we'll stop whining...
(well, maybe).
Judy Perry
On Thu, 20 Sep 2001, Tomas Nally wrote:
> But please don't whine, and misuse the English language by deploying
> words such as "extortion".
