silvert@cs.dal.ca (Bill Silvert) (05/28/90)
In article <1457@vtserf.cc.vt.edu> cohill@vtserf.cc.vt.edu.UUCP (Andrew M. Cohill) writes: > >While I like Borland's approach to tool development, they stink at >customer support. Filling out and sending in registration cards for >Borland products is a joke. In three years of using Borland products I >have never even once received an upgrade notice, information about new >products, or a damn thing. > >Microsoft, on the other hand, is religious about keeping customers >informed. When Word 4.0 (Mac) was late they kept sending out postcards >telling me when they thought it was going to be ready, and kept >apologizing for the delay. Plust they make it very easy to obtain >upgrades by sending you product releases and order cards. This amazes me. My experience is exactly the opposite. Borland sends me all kinds of info, special offers, and, for a while, the now defunct "Turbo Technix" magazine. Microsoft sends me nothing unless I ask for it. More specifically, Borland let me buy the Turbo Pascal 5.5 upgrade at the same reduced rate as everyone else, even though my copy was an ancient CP/M version of TP. As a Borland user (TP and TC) I also got a special offer on Quattro Pro. I don't have Microsoft C, rather MS Fortran. They never notified me about the upgrade from 4.x to 5.0, and I had to struggle to get it out of them. Only when I complained about bugs in 5.0 did they send me a bug fix, and they have never publicized it, even though lots of people keep running into the same bugs I did (judging by the traffic in comp.lang.fortran). Maybe the upgrade policies are compiler-specific? Since I have several Borland products I don't know which ones they support, but I have yet to receive any notification about their C++. Mybe their Pascal support is a separate (and much better) operation. -- William Silvert, Habitat Ecology Division, Bedford Inst. of Oceanography P. O. Box 1006, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, CANADA B2Y 4A2. Tel. (902)426-1577 UUCP=..!{uunet|watmath}!dalcs!biomel!bill BITNET=bill%biomel%dalcs@dalac InterNet=bill%biomel@cs.dal.ca