Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!rutgers!ucla-cs!admin.cognet.ucla.edu!casey
From: casey@admin.cognet.ucla.edu (Casey Leedom)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: Hey Apollo folks...Listen up
Message-ID: <18242@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 24 Nov 88 19:29:36 GMT
References: <8811160706.AA01866@umix.cc.umich.edu> <18162@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Sender: news@CS.UCLA.EDU
Reply-To: casey@cognet.ucla.edu (Casey Leedom)
Organization: UCLA Cognitive Science Program
Lines: 40

| From: dj@cs.ucla.edu.UUCP (David J. Wells)
| 
| The recent flames don't seem to be appropriate for this news group.  These
| flames have been directed at Apollo's marketing decisions, whereas the
| Apollo people who read the group are likely to be engineers.

  Just to let you know that there still some dissent available from this
quarter, I'll make this one last followup (I'm thankfully moving on to a
new job that doesn't require working with Apollos).

  Some of the flames have dealt with marketing decisions, most notably
the unbundling of some of the graphics libraries, the down grading of
some previous Apollo functionality (eg. Fortran library support) towards
that of UNIX, and the unannounced nature of some marketing decisions.

	  I definitely like David Funk's suggestion that Apollo simply
	include the graphics libraries in their distribution and charge
	extra for the manuals.  I think Apollo should seriously consider
	this suggestion.

	  Two suggestions have already been made to accommodate the Fortran
	library support using the COFF object file format (compiler
	switch -split and extended COFF headers).

	  It's easy to let something slip through the cracks when trying
	to describe all the new/different features of a release as large
	as an operating system and one which is as drastically changed.
	The question is how the company deals with the resulting problems
	and user complaints.  I'd give Apollo an ``F'' on this one.

  Finally though, I want to point out that a majority of my complaints
have been and continue to be the technical quality of Apollo's product:
both hardware and software.  SR10 has made some major inroads towards
fixing software problems in previous releases, but is still a long way
off the mark and some of the ``fixes'' have evidenced an incredible
amount of ``Not Invented Here''.  It's unbelievable to me that a company
with as many resources as Apollo can't do any better, but that's not my
problem any more.

Casey