FP Technology

[Brian K. White]

On 12/15/2010 4:05 PM, Richard Kreiss wrote:
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: filepro-list-bounces+rkreiss=verizon.net at lists.celestial.com
>> [mailto:filepro-list-bounces+rkreiss=verizon.net at lists.celestial.com] On
>> Behalf Of Brian K. White
>> Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2010 2:56 PM
>> To: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
>> Subject: Re: FP Technology
>>
>> On 12/15/2010 5:55 AM, fP sales wrote:
>>
>>> We no longer sell or support 5.0 products.  Our current version is 5.6
>>
>> Well, have to admire the tenacity I guess.
>> It's stupid, since it's causing your customers to opt for the wrong side
> of "take
>> it or leave it", but hey it's a free country.
>
> One thing to point out, most companies that release new versions stop
> selling the older version but support the older version for some period of
> time.  A company can't keep developing updates to their program and then
> continue to sell the older version.  That would be like an auto company
> coming out with a new updated model for 2011 and one expect them to continue
> to manufacturer the old model.
>
> I will grant that some companies will sell their previous version at a
> discount for a short period just before and after a new release to clear
> inventory.  This is not the case here as 5.6 has been out for a few years
> now.

The problem is the new version is broken.

There is a whole long saga about how we tried to upgrade a couple years 
ago and almost lost our biggest customer over it not to mention the 
programmer hours we spent doing fp's job trying to debug it ourselves as 
far as we could without the source, just using strace wrappers around 
clerk & report (which slowed the app down a lot, meaning even more 
apologies to the customer we were already apologizing to 3 times a day 
for having their app lock up server-wide, and having to reboot the whole 
server to clear it...)

That was 5.0.15. Reverting to 5.0.14 fixed it all.
Believe me, we wanted some of the new features in 5.0.15 and 5.6. I 
really want larger tables and nestable calls and more-nestable gosubs 
and more auto indexes. So we were definitely motivated to really try to 
make this work. That's why we tried so hard and forced our customers to 
put up with such crappy service for as long as we did before being 
forced to give up and revert to 5.0.14. Sure glad I keep all my 
installers! Boy would I be screwed if I actually had to conform to that 
lovely caring customer-centric decree from fp sales.

--
bkw