Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!ucbvax!CAESAR.CS.MONTANA.EDU!icsu6000
From: icsu6000@CAESAR.CS.MONTANA.EDU (Mathisen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: SR10 librarian (lbr) functionality loss
Message-ID: <8811121837.AA14459@caesar.cs.montana.edu>
Date: 12 Nov 88 18:37:26 GMT
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 46

>   What is this?  Is Apollo just in the business of alienating customers
> now or what?  He tells you there's a problem with your fix to his
> complaint, and then you come back at him ``no there isn't ... but yes
> there is (because his problem is with *SR10.0* - not your *SR10.1*)''.
> 
>   I'm not bothered by this particular problem because I don't do fortran,
> and if I did, I would probably use separate files - it's just a lot more
> convenient.  But I really feel sorry for Eric having to battle this
> typical egocentric Apollo attitude.  Apollo seems to feel that the world
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Amen!!
> revolves about themselves and damn anyone who thinks differently.
	   			^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Another Amen.
> 
> I think we all understand that standards are important, but customer
> support is your primary duty.  If you don't have that, you'll just
> continue to lose market share.  As Eric said (paraphrased :-)) ``If it's
> standard but doesn't work, it isn't worth shit.''
> Casey

  Hear Hear!!  I couldn't agree more.  I manage about 40 workstations and
VAXen for the College of Engineering here at Montana State.  I can easily
say that Apollo has the worst support of any of the vendors that we have,
(Apollo,HP,Tek,DEC -- No Sun's).  We have 19 Apollo's yet, I can't even get
a sales rep to return my phone calls the same week.  I've got technical
questions into the 2APOLLO number that haven't even been replied to, and it's
going on 6 months now, after a couple of call backs to remind them.  This
coupled with lousy software (great ideas, but lousy implementation) has led
me to recommend that our next workstation purchase NOT be Apollo.  Don't know
which of the others I would choose (probably HP), but definitely not Apollo.
As of now, we're just chucking them in the garbage as they break, even if it's
a little thing.
  It's too bad, because I like some of Apollo's ideas.  I think that their
filesystem is great, I like all of the kinky things you can do with links,
the registry is OK, but I wish it was less tightly coupled, performance is
average, the Display Manager is hunky-dory (it's my favorite window setup).
  But....  that's not enough to make me want to put up with all of the down
sides, like only being able to fix msd1600 tape drives as a unit for 6700 bucks,
miserable Ethernet performance, blah, blah , blah...

Jaye Mathisen
mathisen.sys_admin.sys_org
systems manager					icsu6000@caesar.cs.montana.edu
Dept of Computer Science
410 Roberts Hall
Montana State University,
Bozeman, MT 59717