ADM - continued from IM discussion

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Jan 23, 2007 at 03:03 AM

Cassius, I agree with your first point—software development does take a long time.

But your second point is like apples and oranges.

Here’s why.

Tom Davis, aka The Admiral, has not sold a single copy of Zoot on the basis that it was a beta of a 32-bit version of Zoot that would soon be released in its completed form.

In fact, The Admiral has been very careful to make no promises as to an ETA for Zoot 32.

While I think both Tom and Eric are visionaries in terms of creatively conceptualizing software, it should be apparent that The Admiral can out-program virtually anyone else out there, especially the ADM crew.

ADM has been marketing ADM 4 for a long time, initially with the understanding that people were putting out their money for a product that would soon come out of beta. In effect, Stephen Diamond was absolutely correct when he said people were paying a high price for beta software. If it was going to be a matter of weeks or a few months as Eric originally promised it would not have been a big issue. But when months have gone into years it is time to refund money to all those people who purchased a high priced beta, and to say that in reality no one has the foggiest idea when it will be released.

While people waited for ADM 4 Eric found time to play with Skype, and to meet the needs of the Chinese market. While some of us put our reputation on the line backing Eric and ADM, he stopped communicating, pissed people off, and locked down the trusted developers list.

A further difference with re to ADM and Zoot: Zoot in its 16 bit form is remarkably stable, on most 32-bit machines—and has a feature set that remains remarkably contemporary in spite of a somewhat dated GUI and a lack of RTF.

The Admiral has remained in touch with his user base through the Zoot user group, and has never pissed its owner off to the point that they decided to close the list.

Further, The Admiral has responded in a timely manner when Zooters have found bugs or issues with the software.

Cassius wrote:
>While I would agree that purchasing ADM is risky for all the reasons previously cited,
>including the long development time, I can perhaps note two items.
> >1. Software
>development does take a long time, if there isn’t a developer package with the needed
>functions built in.
> >2. 32-bit Zoot has taken MUCH longer, with NO end in sight.
> >-c