Phil,
Without prying too much into the business operations, where have
these new developers come from? To be very honest, my gut feeling is
that Witango in North America is shrinking. If it hasn't, it has
become an isolated underground community. I don't think that I am
alone in having that opinion, I have been in contact at times with
some of the other 'old guard' and that seems the be the first topic
discussed.
I'm not sure what the answer would be. But here are some ramblings on
things that could be changed or could have been handled differently:
I think removing all of the North American distributors raised some
eyebrows. I'm not against why it was done, more against the method in
which it was done. If memory serves me correct, there was no
announcement from Witango Technologies on what was going on. A
proactive message out to the Witango community should have come
before we were notified by the distributors, some of whom were not
happy and let their unhappiness come out 'between the lines' of their
own announcements.
There has been no news announcements on the web site since 2004 which
certainly raises concern for anyone that I discuss Witango with. In
fact the site doesn't appear to have been updated since that time and
it is still not rendering properly with Safari (small cosmetic
problems in the left side navigation).
There should not be any significant delay in providing someone with a
Trial license. In this day and age, you submit your information on a
web form and you should either receive your trial license in the
response page, or in an email no later than 30 minutes after
submitting it. My guess is that you are still manually issuing the
license numbers which should be changed. With the difference in time
zones, that means that anyone in North America who requests a Trial
License will probably not receive it for 1 or even 2 business days.
With the other competitive options that are available, someone
interested would probably have moved on to try something else and
forgotten about putting their request in.
An explanation on the different server versions. After almost 12
years of being a Witango/Tango developer, even I can't remember which
server version is required for which circumstances. Create a clear
explanation and link it from all pages that mention the server.
Allow those of us that have listings in the Developer's Directory to
change our information. I don't know how many times I've tried
changing it, and it still appears with information that is almost 2
years old now.
The biggest and most important thing you can do ...
You just did. Open up to us and have dialogues with us. According to
my email box for Witango-Talk, you posted on April 2nd, and the last
entry that I have from you prior to that was December 13th, 2006.
Prior to that your last post was August 31st, 2006! One thing that
perhaps you are missing is that while you are enjoying the typical
slowdown that comes during your summer months, we are in the midst of
the heavy business season. When you are active on the list (as you
were during May through August last year), we're in our slower summer
period. I'm sorry but not seeing anything from the head honcho for
almost 4 months, and only one posting in 7 months sends out very very
bad signals. Especially when it is the 7 months that the Northern
Hemisphere is making most of their business decisions. We need to
know what is going on, so we can provide answers to our customers,
and our potential new customers.
All of a sudden there is interest in a new Beta for the Mac platform.
And that interest got started simply because you gave us an
explanation on why things were taking so long. It's Spring here in
North America, a time for rebirth, a time to be excited about things.
Baseball is back, the Blue Jays are undefeated so far, only 161 games
left to go! I've played golf twice locally in the month of March,
I've never played twice in March before. I'm still lousy, but at
least I'm outside and playing! But for many of us, we need to get
projects okayed and deals done in the next two months, then it
becomes much more difficult to get decisions made when people are
away on holidays and enjoying the nicer weather.
I'm excited about getting my hands on a new Witango Beta! You must
remember from your days as a Tango developer how exciting it was to
get your hands on a new version of the Studio. Maybe this will get a
few more of us out from under the carpet and we can revitalize the
Witango community in North America.
I hope we can continue to see your more frequent contributions to the
list.
Thanks,
Steve Smith
Oakbridge Information Solutions
Oakville Office: (416) 628-0793
Cambridge Office: (519) 489-0142
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Web: www.oakbridge.ca
Certified DayLite Elite Partner
FileMaker Solutions Alliance Member
On 2-Apr-07, at 10:21 PM, Phil Wade wrote:
Stefan.
No need to apologise, they are all valid points and no damage
done. No offense taken.
The point I will debate you on is your remark about a shrinking
community. The facts are that the Lite edition has actually
brought a lot of developers onto the platform and we actually have
a larger user base now than when we purchased the technology from
Pervasive. Many of the developers that start with a Lite edition
are upgrading to the standard edition as they prove to themselves
that Witango is a viable solution to their needs.
We have also seen that the developers that "leave" the platform
actually just expand their marketability by adding asp.Net or PHP
to their repertoire and keep developing projects with Witango as well.
Regards
Phil
On 03/04/2007, at 11:23 AM, Stefan Gonick wrote:
Hi Everyone,
I screwed up. I meant to send that last message privately. I
really didn't
want to send a negative message to the group at large. I love the
Witango
product and hope that it will continue to exist for many many
years to come.
I will point out that there is often a good explanation behind the
things that
happen at With Ent., even if I would be reassured to know sooner
what they
are. It's easier for me to coast along with things when I do. I
don't know how
to undo any potential damage my message may have caused, but
hopefully
something good will come out of this. I really didn't mean to
cause discord.
Best regards,
Stefan
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