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General Software Discussion / tomos,
« on: May 07, 2017, 03:17 PM »
what you say about Softmaker Office reminds me of an aspect I missed, Underdog Assistance. I've written for hours and I'm tired, but this would be worth to be developed, it's not about being cheaper, being simpler or other "justifications", it's about identification with other people who are NOT in power while the like of Microsoft and Adobe clearly are. And it's fascinating because individual developers can try to trigger that Assistance from many a potential buyer, but most of the time commit mistakes which will break the spell.
It would be interesting to hear your "reasons" of the time which made you chose Softmaker Office over MS: Was it early enough for cheap MS Office licenses not being available yet? Since even at similar prices - around 100$ vs around 100$ for a MS "Home & Student" license it's evident for many people that their money go to the Underdog, not to the richest man in the world, even when they get much less functionality for the price - "I don't need the overkill", they silence their doubts in those cases: in fact, for political reasons, they then go against their own best interests (old laptops excluded here). No pun intended, it's just human and rather "friendly buying", you you tell us, your loyalty was unidirectional: They don't return the attachment of their customers, but just take advantage of it. (This aspect is one of the points I referred to by saying they break the spell by making mistakes, just having found your niche isn't enough, for a developer, they need to secure it, too.)
And what you have experienced with DO (which stands in for other programs here of course) is another aspect of what I said about not having the time/leisure to dig deep enough (again, in your case); when I had had that other, Win10 pc, for some days, every usage of (my) standard software was horrible, having made the installation, but not having all the thousands (!) of little tweaks - before, I had even taken note of many of them, in order to replicate them, but it just wasn't the real thing, and would have taken months, and hundreds of hours, to get even near there.
(Besides, I probably over-simplified my description in the other thread; some months ago, I had unsuccessfully tried to buy a new HP workstation with Win10 and a good XEON processor in the range of the i7, but they were already sold out at the very good price (1100€ but without graphics card yet), so now I had bought a used HP workstation, with a processor which is said to be similar to an i5 (and with that 4 GB graphics card, 400€, also with 16 GB server RAM), and that really was a big disappointment, independently of its instability / alleged motherboard fault.)
So going back to my old XP pc has been literally a relief for me, and I would pay a good price for a really good tool which was able to transfer my programs, with settings, to a modern pc, but from what I read about such programs, even from 7 to 7, 7 to 8, or 10 to 10, they are not strong, so taking it all from XP to 10 and hoping to get much help from such a program, would be delusional.
But what you report, discloses another very important factor in selling, and in pricing, too: It's quite easy for a developer to guarantee the transfer of all (!) the settings from one pc to another, but almost none even ever touches the subject, and it's with software that can be deeply personalized, and which will gain almost all its power from such extensive personalization that such transfer help is of paramount importance, and from one software version to the next, this should not even be a subject of worth mentioning. But you updated to 11, then, in spite of those goodies not available to you anymore? That's what I'd call an very loyal customer!
But then, if you really did, I admit that filing with DO's more fun than with, say, xplorer2, that's for sure, graphically and functionally, but then, the latter's developer is not that open to his customers' suggestions, either, he's a very (brilliant) technical guy (see his new search tool, specialized in meta data: wow!)
But now I finally must check the French election results now, I don't have the slightest idea yet (about the percentages, that is, I'd guess around 63:37 or even more apart (advantage: High Finance), so I'm not intrigued by the possible outcome, would have checked if I had had any doubt); software design being just too fascinating a subject for me, you even could speak of addiction.
EDIT:
Ok, ok, it's 65:35, and nobody here will believe me I didn't know 1 minute ago. That's life. ;-)
It would be interesting to hear your "reasons" of the time which made you chose Softmaker Office over MS: Was it early enough for cheap MS Office licenses not being available yet? Since even at similar prices - around 100$ vs around 100$ for a MS "Home & Student" license it's evident for many people that their money go to the Underdog, not to the richest man in the world, even when they get much less functionality for the price - "I don't need the overkill", they silence their doubts in those cases: in fact, for political reasons, they then go against their own best interests (old laptops excluded here). No pun intended, it's just human and rather "friendly buying", you you tell us, your loyalty was unidirectional: They don't return the attachment of their customers, but just take advantage of it. (This aspect is one of the points I referred to by saying they break the spell by making mistakes, just having found your niche isn't enough, for a developer, they need to secure it, too.)
And what you have experienced with DO (which stands in for other programs here of course) is another aspect of what I said about not having the time/leisure to dig deep enough (again, in your case); when I had had that other, Win10 pc, for some days, every usage of (my) standard software was horrible, having made the installation, but not having all the thousands (!) of little tweaks - before, I had even taken note of many of them, in order to replicate them, but it just wasn't the real thing, and would have taken months, and hundreds of hours, to get even near there.
(Besides, I probably over-simplified my description in the other thread; some months ago, I had unsuccessfully tried to buy a new HP workstation with Win10 and a good XEON processor in the range of the i7, but they were already sold out at the very good price (1100€ but without graphics card yet), so now I had bought a used HP workstation, with a processor which is said to be similar to an i5 (and with that 4 GB graphics card, 400€, also with 16 GB server RAM), and that really was a big disappointment, independently of its instability / alleged motherboard fault.)
So going back to my old XP pc has been literally a relief for me, and I would pay a good price for a really good tool which was able to transfer my programs, with settings, to a modern pc, but from what I read about such programs, even from 7 to 7, 7 to 8, or 10 to 10, they are not strong, so taking it all from XP to 10 and hoping to get much help from such a program, would be delusional.
But what you report, discloses another very important factor in selling, and in pricing, too: It's quite easy for a developer to guarantee the transfer of all (!) the settings from one pc to another, but almost none even ever touches the subject, and it's with software that can be deeply personalized, and which will gain almost all its power from such extensive personalization that such transfer help is of paramount importance, and from one software version to the next, this should not even be a subject of worth mentioning. But you updated to 11, then, in spite of those goodies not available to you anymore? That's what I'd call an very loyal customer!
But then, if you really did, I admit that filing with DO's more fun than with, say, xplorer2, that's for sure, graphically and functionally, but then, the latter's developer is not that open to his customers' suggestions, either, he's a very (brilliant) technical guy (see his new search tool, specialized in meta data: wow!)
But now I finally must check the French election results now, I don't have the slightest idea yet (about the percentages, that is, I'd guess around 63:37 or even more apart (advantage: High Finance), so I'm not intrigued by the possible outcome, would have checked if I had had any doubt); software design being just too fascinating a subject for me, you even could speak of addiction.
EDIT:
Ok, ok, it's 65:35, and nobody here will believe me I didn't know 1 minute ago. That's life. ;-)