Genera 8.0 Announcement

[RDP@ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lasc-research.lockheed.com (Robert D. Pfeiffer))]

    Date: Mon, 5 Mar 90 00:59 CST
    From: Cohen@MCC.COM (Richard M. Cohen)

	Date: 2 Mar 90 15:57:00 GMT
	From: groberts@yukon.scrc.symbolics.com, jr@yukon.scrc.symbolics.com

	This letter went out in hardcopy to all customers this week. The sales
	reps also received this letter. If you have questions, please address
	them to your sales rep, Gary Roberts, or Johanna Rothman.

	----

	Dear Symbolics Owner,

	...

	Customers eligible for Genera 8.0 will receive distribution media, an
	initial documentation set, and one extra documentation set for each
	additional five covered systems at a site.

    In the brouhaha the new restrictions on software distribution, perhaps
    this additional policy change got overlooked.  Apparently we no longer
    get a set of documentation for each machine under software maintenance!
    Do we even get one set of release notes per machine?  Do we get the
    right the duplicate the documentation for the other machines under
    software maintenance?

    Symbolics tried to pull a similar stunt back at Release 5, claiming that
    they would only distribute one set of documentation per site.  The
    policy was very short-lived.

    -- Rich

Yes, this point bothered me as well.  I'm assuming it's an attempt to
control costs (which is very sensible from a business point of view).
But I'm not sure that the money they save on documentation will be worth
the collective annoyance of their customers.  For my site, this has the
potential to be a real pain in the butt.  The documentation will be a
scarce resource which we will be constantly swapping around while we
wait trying to push a trivial purchase request through our extremely
slow (and very bureaucratic) purchasing system.  It just feels like
we're being "nickled and dimed".

Although I should mention that our salesman is typically very
accomodating in matters such as these, I still think the *policy* is
less than great.  If the intent is to avoid shipping documentation for
"covered" systems for which the customer has no need of documentation,
perhaps Symbolics could attack the problem from the opposite direction.
Have each site return a form stating how many copies of the
documentation set they will need, up to a maximum of the full number of
covered machines.  After that you pay extra.  In other words, ask the
customer to volunteer to forego unneeded documentation (and save a few
trees as well!).  At our site, I would guess we would ask for
documentation sets for roughly half the covered machines.