It just shows how stupid they are and how prepared they are top bury their heads in the sand rather than listen to customer feedback. It also shows the level of contempt with which they treat their customers.
The net effect is that manyh users will simply stop recommending their software and will never buy another title.
Personally I think the whole thing is a way to alienate people who have lifetime licenses! Bad idea as they have formed the bedrock of their sales team.
-Carol Haynes
I think that is probably happening right now, the negative recommendations. It's a shame, really. Their products are truly well done, but the developer, Alwin, is very foolish IMO for responding arrogantly to all the negative comments made in his forum. Don't get me wrong: many of the comments were really nasty - we all have seen just how malicious some forum folks can be when they are unhappy. The general anonymity of the Web seems to often breed a belligerence in attitude and a recklessness in language used by people who are probably not nearly so rude in person. Nature of the Internet, I guess, though that's no excuse for such behavior.
But Alwin cannot simply ignore the comments and continue with business. I think he must be quite a hot head personally, though I've never met him nor actually spoken with him. A wiser developer who made the same business decisions after analyzing his company's economic needs would post strictly factual answers as to his reasoning for changing the program structure once, and then make his answers pinned threads. Then he should not respond to any further nastiness from users except to warn those who go beyond the rules of civility in his opinion, and ban those who persisted. He should still reply to serious comments and questions; just not the really rude comments that seem to be attempts to bait him. Things would blow over soon enough. He might lose some customers but if he were picking up many more new users - as he continually claimed his business projections indicated - the pain would be short-lived and relatively minor. He took a completely different path, though, and posted very sarcastic, arrogant, and even rude, offensive replies. Then finally deleted them all but only after a couple months of chaos in his forums.
Arguing with his customers and calling them names might have made him feel good somehow at the time, but I have to believe that his extreme arrogance hurt him more than his new version of Movie Collector!
At one point he and I had an exchange of PMs - he PM'd me about some of my posts about the early Book Collector build issues. He praised some of my posts where I alerted them to bugs but he also asked if I could try not to sound negative in others. I disagreed but I mention that the Movie Collector forum was where the negative posts could be found. I mentioned his unusually caustic tone there. He replied like he didn't realize he was being caustic at all. So maybe he truly doesn't see it. Who knows?!
Thanks!
Jim
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this one is kind of on the pricey side but I bought one back in 1994 and it still going strong. Actually I recently used it to power bleed my brake system on my f350
