Klatuu,
You're absolutely right. This release has taken far longer than we
anticipated. We originally planned to just add support for Access 2003
and ship it. But at that time we were getting very few requests for
Access 2003 functionality. Given the fact that we had a workaround for
Access 2003, we decided to "go for it" and add some additional new
functionality that we'd been planning for the future, such as a compare
feature. In retrospect, we should have just shipped an Access 2003
version before embarking on what turned out to be a major design
effort. That's where we screwed up.
Although many of our customers are able to use the workaround (i.e.
also installing Access 2002), we realize that this isn't an option for
everyone. We have lost many sales due to the fact that we don't
currently have a solution for customers who can only run Access 2003. I
think it would be accurate to say that we are "highly motivated" to
ship a high quality version 5.0 product as soon as possible.
We've been in business since 1995. Our first product, a database
analyzer named "Tracker", worked with Access 1.1. During the past 11
years, we have had a total of eight major product releases, with an
average time between releases of 16.5 months. This one's definitely
taking longer than most, but we're also setting our goals higher than
usual.
Over the years, we've had a lot of conversations with a lot of
customers. We've received many feature requests, and we've gained a
pretty good sense of the kinds of things that our customers would like
to see. Our new compare feature takes a different approach than most.
We've put a lot of time and effort into it. We think that it's going to
offer some unique benefits.
But every tool and every tool vendor has its strengths and weaknesses.
We definitely have room for improvement when it comes to predicting
release dates. People are always asking us for a definite date, and we
always do our best to be realistic, saying that we "hope" to ship by
<target date>. But after 11 years in business, I fear that we are no
better at predicting release dates today than we were at the beginning.
Your criticism of our shifting release date is quite legitimate. I lose
sleep over that issue.
Please believe me when I say that we are trying our very best to
deliver a quality product as rapidly as possible. I am very sorry for
any inconvenience that our long release schedule has caused for you and
others who may find it problematic to employ the workaround mentioned
earlier.
Bob Snyder, President
Black Moshannon Systems
http://www.moshannon.com
1-814-345-5657 (M-F 8am-5pm Eastern)
That is what you have been saying for two years. I have abandoned your
product, because it is not feasible in most cases to have multiple versions
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