Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!psuvax1!wuarchive!usc!orion.oac.uci.edu!easu015
From: easu015@orion.oac.uci.edu (Jason Goldberg)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: "IMAGINE" .. a rip off?
Message-ID: <2740DBEA.14165@orion.oac.uci.edu>
Date: 14 Nov 90 05:53:46 GMT
References: <730016@hpmwngf.HP.COM> <15843@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Distribution: usa
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Lines: 73

Rick,
	I agree that most of the complaints about Impulse Imagine in
this thread were unfair, and it was good of you to point them out.  Also,
I know you to be a very knowledgeable Amiga user and your recommendation of 
the product along with those of many on CI$ lead me to believe that it is
a good product, I personally don't do enough rendering to be a fair judge.
	However, there are more problems with Impulse's customer support of
this product line that you either forgot to mention or didn't know about:

I used to be the Amiga Product Manager for a new chain of Computer super store,
which sold the Amiga along with IBM, Apple, Epson, HP, etc...  The chain was
owned by the owners of Inacomp and funded by Mitsubishi, it was a very bright
spot for CBM, and CBM West Coast District Sales considered it one of, if not
the, most important accounts they had.  (I am not telling you anything because
you still worked at West Coast District Sales, when ComputerCity began selling
Amigas).

The Amiga product line, ultimately failed at ComputerCity despite some very
promising early results.  It is my personally opinion that companies and 
customer support such as that Impulse provided us, is a perfect example of
why the Amiga failed in a main stream dealer such as ComputerCity.

I originally ordered 12 Turbo Silver's from our distributor.  The problems
with Amiga Distributors is another story (for me a long ugly one...).  Anyway,
unlike the policy of almost any Non-Amiga distributor, I was not provided 
a dealer demo of Turbo Silver.  I called the company and they were not 
interested in providing any demo software that could be used to help sell
their product, but they did offer to steal my account from their own 
distributor.  That looked real professional with our cooperate buyers.

Anyway, I personally bought a copy, and used that as a dealer demo.  The
problem is that it crashed on all our A2000HD's, A2500's, and A2500/030.
This was before the mem location zero issue, was publicly known.  I call
Impulse and they say that CBM made an error in building their product and
that Impulse had no intention of correcting CBM's mistake.  But, if I
wanted to upgrade to Silver SV that the problem would go away.  Now, the
problem is that Impulse will not sell the upgrade to dealers, so I have
to try and sell my 12 copies to customers and have them call Impulse and
pay more money for a working version.  

Finally, I get my Turbo Silver SV and it has exactly the same problem.  It
will not work on any machine that has a 2091, due to the non-zero value
in location zero.  They did not volunteer this info to me, and suggested that
I call CBM and ask them to fix their hardware.

Well, once the Cooperate buyer hears this story, he refuses to purchase any
Impulse product and we have to send our unsold copies of Turbo Silver back to
the distributor.

Meanwhile, I still get Impulse news letters all the time, stating what a great
customer service company they are!

Next, I read in the vendor forum on CIS that Impulse would appreciate it if 
people would stop calling and complaining about all the bugs in SV, since
they have decided not to fix them, but to allow people to upgrade to
Imagine for the bargain price of $150.

Then, I read that credit cards were charged for Imagine 3 months before
the product was shipped.  That when people did receive Imagine it was
beta release .9 and that only the .fp version worked.  If you needed the
.int version you needed to pay to send back your disk, to have them send you
a new working beta version.  Still, no one to my knowledge has received v1.0
and I seriously doubt how bug-free v1.0 will be anyway, based on their
past history.

So, while I agree that it would have been very nice of Impulse to offer a 
$150 upgrade to move to a more capable product.  I don't feel that anyone
should support a company who is charging $190 ($150 for Imagine, and $40 for
SV) to original owners of Turbo Silver who have never been given a version
which is even close to bug free.


-Jason-