Re: Symbolics' attitude problem

[Mabry Tyson <TYSON@WARBUCKS.AI.SRI.COM>]

I concur with Chris -- Symbolics is quite responsive.  I can't personally
compare Symbolics's responsiveness with, say, SUN or DEC or IBM.  But look
through the past few months of SLUG mail and you'll see mail from
Dan Weinreb, David Moon, Scott McKay, (and more but I'm not going to take
the time to go looking through my back mail -- excuse me if you're one
of the developers I missed!).  Symbolics has an internal distribution of
SLUG mail so I can't really tell who reads it.  For a while, the new
president was apparently reading it.

We've been working with Symbolics since the beginning (eg, our original
quote for a 3600 specified 256K memory and 80mb disk!).  From a customer's
point of view, the company has had its ups and downs.  Right now I think
that relations with customers are probably the best since the very early
days when there were only a handful of customers.  There were long periods
where many of their problems were due to trying to grow from a small
company to a large one.  Recently we've seen some transient problems when
they've had to scale back to a smaller company.  Some of those are still
going on.  I think the financial problems the company has had are due
to the AI workstation market not going the way their financial planners
expected it to.

Symbolics has been an unqualified technical success.  I hope the Ivory
board will continue that success and lead the way to a financial recovery.
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