Re: xyWin customization guide?

[kfrank@xxxxxxxx (Kenneth Frank)]

I read a cute, sarcastic dialog written by Annie Fisher which I
am sure I could simply ignore, but since it really doesn't
reflect our attitude at all I decided to take the bait.

>   "How can we get rid of those persistent version 3 loyalists?"
>   "Easy. No new drivers and we'll charge for tech support."
>   "Cool! But how can we keep them from upgrading from 3 to 4?"

Honestly we have mixed feelings about version 3 loyalists. We
are genuinely glad that the product is still good enough after
all these years to be the WP of choice for a pretty large group
of people, and if we could finance our business off of that past
success we'd be thrilled. But we have been giving free tech
support (which is quite expensive) to customers who haven't paid
anything for a long time-- in some cases 6-8 years! Almost no
other company does that today. Our decision to charge for tech
support was actually a way to acknowledge that version 3 does
suit many of you quite well, and to enable us to afford to
continue to support those who wish to stay with it.

The drivers are another matter. As good as Version 3 is, in many
ways its innards suffer from some pretty severe limitations
making building printer drivers for newer printers exceedingly
difficult, if not impossible. And, since our development
resources are not unlimited, we must choose between investing in
active development for new products, or products we are no longer
 selling or enhancing. That choice is obvious.

We would be happy if our users upgraded to 4-- its a great DOS
product and by all accounts quite stable. With some revisions
we have just completed, it is now almost completely
plug-and-play compatible with III+ macros and help frames, and
in almost every way gives you everything III+ had and a whole lot
more.

>   "Well, we're pretty much homefree now with xyDos. But xyWin in still a
> problem. ... Hmmm. They like to customize xyWrite, right? That halfbaked
> xyDos customization manual didn't seem to discourage them even though we gave
> them next to no help porting from version 3. So we won't document how to
> customize xyWin at all!"

We have made a good part of our living because our products are
customizable, and we have not deliberately tried to make it
difficult in the Windows product, although I acknowledge the
customization information in the manual is pretty weak. Without
undertaking a major writing exercise here, we are willing to
make reasonable additional materials available if we can get an
idea of what would be useful. As to porting from 3, we have spent
a LOT of time ensuring compatibility with older macros and help
frames.

> "But they'll call us. As horrible as we've made our voicemail, they just
> keep calling. We could retire on what they pay the phone company for long
> distance calls to us. What can we do about the ones who *still* call
> voicemail or the--waddaya call it--that bulletin board thingie?"

Believe it or not we have changed our horrible telephone system.
It is still automated, but there is now a managed hold queue and
we even give you nice classical music to listen to if you have
to hold, but the average hold time is really rather modest. A
lot better than most of the support lines I have been calling
lately. And most users I hear from report that on the whole the
quality of support is good.

>   "[M]ost of them are hooked on xyWrite. And of course
> we'll leave bugs in the upgrades."

Right. We've learned our lesson from III+-- if you make a
product too good no-one will upgrade .

Truth is we are working hard to not only support the XyWrite
past, but to give it a real future for those who appreciate its
strengths. In this world of software behemoths that is no easy
task and we really need all the help we can get. In fact we are
working on some extremely exciting new developments and
enhancements, while trying to get the Windows product to the same
level of rock solid stability III+ evolved into and 4 now
approaches. We think we will be able to penetrate a lot of
markets with our new products when they are released, and
hopefully that will enable us to devote more resources to
providing the extra "goodies" I know you would all like to see,
like newsletters, technical support notes, etc.

We know what our users would like, but we also know that we must
be prudent in management of our business so we and XyWrite will
be around tomorrow.

Kenneth Frank