Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.dal.ca!silvert
From: silvert@cs.dal.ca (Bill Silvert)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Notifying users of upgrades
Message-ID: <1990May28.140231.11993@cs.dal.ca>
Date: 28 May 90 14:02:31 GMT
References: <1457@vtserf.cc.vt.edu>
Sender: silvert@cs.dal.ca.UUCP (Bill Silvert)
Reply-To: bill%biomel@cs.dal.ca
Distribution: na
Organization: Habitat Ecology Div., Bedford Inst. of Oceanography
Lines: 41

In article <1457@vtserf.cc.vt.edu> cohill@vtserf.cc.vt.edu.UUCP (Andrew M. Cohill) writes:
>
>While I like Borland's approach to tool development, they stink at
>customer support. Filling out and sending in registration cards for
>Borland products is a joke.  In three years of using Borland products I
>have never even once received an upgrade notice, information about new
>products, or a damn thing.
>
>Microsoft, on the other hand, is religious about keeping customers
>informed.  When Word 4.0 (Mac) was late they kept sending out postcards
>telling me when they thought it was going to be ready, and kept
>apologizing for the delay.  Plust they make it very easy to obtain
>upgrades by sending you product releases and order cards.

This amazes me.  My experience is exactly the opposite.  Borland sends
me all kinds of info, special offers, and, for a while, the now defunct
"Turbo Technix" magazine.  Microsoft sends me nothing unless I ask for it.

More specifically, Borland let me buy the Turbo Pascal 5.5 upgrade at
the same reduced rate as everyone else, even though my copy was an
ancient CP/M version of TP.  As a Borland user (TP and TC) I also got a
special offer on Quattro Pro.

I don't have Microsoft C, rather MS Fortran.  They never notified me
about the upgrade from 4.x to 5.0, and I had to struggle to get it out
of them.  Only when I complained about bugs in 5.0 did they send me a
bug fix, and they have never publicized it, even though lots of people
keep running into the same bugs I did (judging by the traffic in
comp.lang.fortran).

Maybe the upgrade policies are compiler-specific?  Since I have several
Borland products I don't know which ones they support, but I have yet to
receive any notification about their C++.  Mybe their Pascal support is
a separate (and much better) operation.


-- 
William Silvert, Habitat Ecology Division, Bedford Inst. of Oceanography
P. O. Box 1006, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, CANADA B2Y 4A2.  Tel. (902)426-1577
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