A reality check please!

Posted by Jack Crawford
Mar 6, 2007 at 01:22 AM

I’m surprised at these endless discussions about ADM and the internal workings of the company behind it. May I respectfully suggest that people accept the situation for what it obviously is ... and move on.

Commercial software is replete with risks and disappointments. As others have commented here, many are small scale operations and if sales aren’t buoyant, the business withers and/or dies. If the enterprise is successful, the opposite thing often happens - the company merges or gets bought out by one of the big boys.

After years of loyalty to Mijenix (the makers of Power Desk, Zip magic et al), I saw the company sell off its products and morph into something else. Devotees of Ecco Pro have their own story to tell. I vowed long ago not to be totally dependent on a particular product and certainly not to let misplaced loyalty blind me to the realities of the commercial world.

Many of the products we discuss here from our narrow user perspective are only a tool in a bigger business market to their makers. Inspiration is in the education market, Casesoft the legal market, Sycon the knowledge management and QA markets, MS world domination

etc etc etc.

After years of avoiding MS like the plague, I recently migrated back to IE7 and OneNote. I have no loyalty whatsoever to Microsoft, but OneNote is a superb, ground breaking product which matches my needs better than anything else I’ve seen. In 5 years time, I may well be using something else so I will make sure I don’t get trapped in a particular format and that my data is portable.

At the risk of sounding egotistic, testing and using software is about the ability of the vendor to meet MY needs as the customer, not the other way round. We all want to be loyal, but in this game you have to think of yourself first. Otherwise you end up feeling betrayed and ripped off. I think we all have better things to do than cry over spilt milk.

[small rant ends]

Jack