Why?

Nick, I'm not some student that's been trapped in academia my entire life. I don't know what kind of experiences that you've had; however, I don't doubt that you know what your talking about. I do think that you've underestimated how well your education must have prepared you along the way. Remember, it's not WHAT you learned while getting your MBA that was important, it's that you learned how to learn that counts. So, obviously you must have done that well.

Mr. Wilders, first I'd like to thank you for allowing this dialogue to take place. You are certainly correct that DCS has earned the right to follow their own strategy. I just wanted to clarify that it's not their marketing strategy that I feel needs improved. I just feel that all could benefit from improving their communication strategy with existing customers.

BlueZannetti,
You have quite a resume with what appears to be a good combination of experience and education (combination is the key, as both are extremely important). Have you had any dealings with Purdue University?

 

Well said. I meant no offense. My business education was preceded by 4+ years in the United States Marine Corps, which, it turns out, is a decent "business" school as well. Go easy on the guys at DCS. They not only face competitive threats, they have to deal with a class of sociopaths deliberately bent on rendering their product useless.

Nick

 

Fortunately a product not even being released can't be rendered useless by nobody. Nor can nobody comment it's features and what it does or probably not.
If it has some of the options of TDS-3 you can make your coffee with it and washing the dishes, besides protecting and analysing your system.

Maybe it could have a HijackThis log analyser, would be really practical.

 

Thanks Paul, but as you seem to know quite well, it's not what you've learned, but whether you keep learning.

It's been a while. I did sponsor some R&D funding from my employer a few years back for a handful of years. That's about it.

So true Nick. Some of my best education, or maybe it's best to say pure motivation, came from driving a fork lift in a warehouse during third shift for a few summers. You learn to deal with all types of people and situations in a positive way.

There - now let's get back to supporting the folks at TDS, not to mention Paul, Jooske, and the rest of the helpful crew at Wilders who spend their time lending an ear and providing help when it's needed most....

Blue

 

Jooske,
I can tell you about one of the valuable features that I know TDS-4 will have. It will come with access to a forum where smart people like yourself will be there eagerly awaiting to help with any issue that arrises.

Nick,
No offense taken and as a former military man myself (U.S. Air Force), I have nothing but respect for the Marines. I'm not trying to be hard on the guys at DCS. I'm just trying to offer up a different way for them to view customer communication and the value that comes with it. Sometimes companies develop a strategy or a way of doing things and for whatever reasons don't give alternative ways consideration. When problems arise these companies will often hire expensive consultants to come in and help them solve these problems. A lot of times improved communications at some level is part of the solution. When the consutants ask why things were being done a certain way, the reason can be a foolish as, "well...that's the way we've always done it." I'm not saying that is going on in this case, but it illustrates my point. Companies sometimes hold on to a way of doing things even though it isn't the best for their customers and ultimately it isn't the best for them.

 

dallen,

After TDS4 is released (and registered TDS3 users will be able to upgrade for free), people like myself, Jason, Gavin etc will also have more time for discussions, but at the moment as I'm sure you can understand we are up to our necks in development, now with virtually all of the required research completed over the last few years.

These two threads were more about when TDS4 is to be released rather than about customer communication, but I'm disappointed about your views about how we go about it, although we haven't had any complaints before. We have two public forums where all fulltime workers including myself make ourselves available Mon-Fri (and often weekends, sometimes even public holidays like yesterday) while we work to provide free support to forum users, even though it puts us in the personal firing line. We also provide free email support, and there's a contact facility on our website - I can't think of many ways to make it easier to communicate with us, but with only 24 hours in a day we simply don't have this amount of time to spend talking about something as relatively trivial as whether or not we should give you an ETA for an unreleased program, even though we've repeatedly made it clear why we couldn't even if we wanted to. When it's released feel free to ask as many questions about the software as possible, our history there speaks for itself - just scroll back through the forum over the last few years.

Anyway, back to work so that we can provide you with software rather than posts describing it.

Regards,
Wayne