askSam - or not...?

Posted by Graham Smith
Dec 24, 2006 at 11:01 AM

Derek,

>Yes, I remember your askSam experience earlier in the year. Their
>behaviour seems positively self-destructive, unless they have a huge pool of
>satisfied corporate users we don’t know about.

I remember very good support on the AskSam Compuserve forum, and its still has some unique features. It is very fast once you get data into it and the flexibility of forms or freeform or something in between.

I certainly decided it was the easiest tool for putting together my “Information base”, except for it not working properly and the inability to import Excel tables.

In the end I used a MyBase self executing data base , but it was rather slow, so then I started to convert the Word and Excel files into PDFs, which was, and contnues, to be an interesting experience. Every PDF converter I have used has a flaw in the conversion, for example the Word files have several dozen charts and different converters converted different charts into black rectangles. or they would miss out footers etc.

I haven’t found one that works yet. I have exhausted the usual suspects Adobe (but version 6 since that was what I had) Jaws, and PDF factory, and am still downloading and trying the less well known ones.
> >As for Citation, I’ve been down the
>same path. I wanted to upgrade to v9 - as I said earlier, it is an elegant program - but the
>support was so dire or simply absent that I just couldn’t.

Yep, but still tempted at every Christmas offer :-(

I’d be interested to know
>what is behind this sort of problem with some software. Do the original developers
>sell out to box-shifters? Does the developer get bored? Do the programmers move on?
>(Sounds like the Symantec story…)

I suspect its a combination of all of these things, plus as a company gets bigger it seems more and more difficult to continue providing the same service.

In a completely different industry, I was part of a small company of very dedicated people who had a feeling of responsibility to their clients ( it was small enough so that all our clients were “everyones” clients) and where we all worked many extra hours for no pay. As it got bigger, it gradually disinitigrated.

The company now had more clients so we had more internal competition for resources. More effort was put into looking after your own clients at the expense of other peoples clients, even though they were all clients of the same company.

Plus as we got more staff, we started to get people who wouldn’t put in extra hours without being paid over time, more people who saw their current job as a stepping stone to something better, and the sense of a team all pulling together broke down. Eventually we were bought over , and we became a “proper” business where just about every decision had be formally approved by at least two other people, none of which seemed to have any understanding of the business. Soon after that, the original company effectively vanished as by that time all of the people who had made the reputation of the original company had left .

Actually, it is a far longer and more complicated story than this, but its a basic story line that seems repeated over and over again.

Graham