Re: XyWin 4.12

[W BECHSTEIN CXI00541@xxxxxxxx]

Nathan Sivin writes:

> I have been using XYWRITE since v. 1, have never received a mailing ...

Now that I find a bit surprising. I am also less than enthusiastic about
The Technology Group's current handling of Xy-related matters,
but I found the original publishers of XyWrite, namely XyQuest
Inc., much better in this regard. Although I am based in Japan, I
always make it a point to send in my registration cards for software I buy from the U.S., and
XyQuest always notified me of upgrades and sent me their
newsletter.
I think all the trouble started with the abortive 'takeover' of
XyQuest by IBM and the bungled attempt to make Signature into the successor of
DisplayWrite. When IBM suddenly backed out at the last minute, I
think they left XyQuest in the lurch and they ended up with TTG.
In fact, even after XyWrite had become part of TTG, I did receive
one mailing, by the president of TTG (whose name escapes me at
the moment). In that letter, a number of claims were made to the
effect that the user base and support channels would be expanded
and that development of the program would continue. However,
after this initial heady rush, there seems to have been little
follow-up.

I also would very much like to see some sort of public statement by
TTG on this list as to where Xy4DOS and Xy4Win are headed.

As to the question of who uses XyWrite, I think that Doug
Beeson's comment is probably on the mark, i.e. not so much people
in business offices writing memos, reports and presentations, but rather people in various
'niches' of the market. My personal cubbyhole is translation. I use
Xy4DOS for many hours a day to pound out Japanese-to-English and
Japanese-to-German technical translations. Incidentally, for the latter
I use Xy4DOS with the German-language spell checker and thesaurus
that were available as an add-on for Signature. Since these don't
work with the Windows version, I would very much welcome the appearance of a
German language module for Xy4Win, but I realize that the chances
for this are likely to be _very_ slim.

Wolfgang Bechstein CXI00541@xxxxxxxx
=============================================