Re: Symbolics' attitude problem

[Roy M Turner <royt@pravda.gatech.edu>]

Chalk up another vote of confidence for Symbolics' relationship with their
customers.  I've always found their customer service people, whether I've
talked to them over the phone, in person, or via mail, to be very helpful
and--wonder of wonders--quite knowledgable.  I may (and probably more often
than I should) gripe about some aspect of the software (e.g., the gripe about
compile-system that has sparked this discussion <sigh>), but I, too, feel
confident that the developers take my gripes into consideration--despite the
charges of arrogance that have been bandied about.  There are *always* going
to be differences of opinion about what constitutes the "correct" behavior of
a piece of software, and where along the continuum the tradeoff occurs between 
complexity of the software and meeting the user community's needs--witness
PL/I: you could do damn near anything with it, but it was so complex
that...well, how many PL/I users are there left outside of IBM? (Yeah, I know,
complexity wasn't PL/I's only problem--gimme a break, it's just an example!
:-)

Like Mabry and Chris, I don't think Symbolics' fiscal problems stem from their
lack of responsiveness to their customers as much as from competition from the
other workstation people out there.  I hope they can hang in there...the
thought of having an MacIvory on my desk is pretty nice.

	--Roy