Genera 8.0 Announcement

[kosma%stc-sun@STC.LOCKHEED.COM (Monty Kosma)]

   Date: Mon, 5 Mar 90 09:59 PST
   From: RDP@ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lasc-research.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.

right, this is going to be a real pain if we do not get documentation for
around half of our machines.  We may have fifteen or twenty machines, but
they are fairly spread out and we're going to need more than three or four
sets of docs.