A No-Win Situation for Product Developers

This is a no-win situation for product developers.

Here they do it again: PalmOne releases yet another new device that is incompatible with previous ones, provides no advance warning to developers about it, provides no documentation whatsoever about the changes they have done and no advice about how to handle the new incompatibilities... And WE get blamed for it!

This is a No-Win situation because we have our development schedules and people lined-up on other projects where we also have customers who have been waiting, sometimes for quite a long time... And now we should stop everything else and dissatisfy these patient customers just because PalmOne behaved once again in an amateurish manner. (It is one thing for PalmOne to behave in an amateurish way as far as software development is concerned but it would be even worse if its incompetence were to spread by example.)

For now I guess we are at the mercy of the developer and if they want to put any time into this. (Sounds like they don't) and [...] until the support team and developer decide that the loyal customer is worth something.

This is completely undeserved and misdirected: We have been promising a Fitaly 4 version to our Pocket PC customers for quite some time but where have you seen us promising a LifeDrive version, a device whose existence we discovered, on May 19th 2005? Have you written to Palm to complain about the incompatibility and threaten to return your LifeDrive unless third-party applications can work on it? As long as customers as you take this attitude of accepting anything that comes from PalmOne, they will have an a posteriori justification for their total neglect of compatibility.

When you buy your next PDA, ask yourself whether you are buying a new piece of hardware or a platform to run software. In the latter case, make sure the vendor commits to compatibility with other devices you have.

With respect to the LifeDrive, we are geting a unit and will look at it. If the problem is trivial (and angels land on earth again) we may have something in a month. If it turns out to be as difficult as the T3 development was, this may be more like three months given our other current commitments.

P.S. I am not being offensive or vulgar just stating my opinion. please let other read my point of view and keep this post active.

I did delete an anonymous message on the same subject (I have no way of knowing whether it was yours) and this is something that we routinely do to keep the forum on focus. Whenever I delete a message, I send a private email to the author stating my reasons and giving her/im a chance to ammend it. Of course the only thing I can try with an anonymous message without a reply email address is thought transmission and it may occasionally work :)

This being said, the main purpose of this forum is exchanging technical information. Moreover we do have a money-back policy which we apply liberally and if anyone is dissatisfied with Fitaly it applies there too.

http://www.textware.com/order/policies.htm

But let's not forget the source of the problem: If your new ThinkPad could not run Excel, would you complain to IBM (Lenovo) or to Microsoft?

Jean Ichbiah

PS. You complain about not getting response to emails. First we try to respond in priority to support messages. But let's admit that there are circumstances in life where one is not able to respond and we encountered one recently. Besides, try to send an email to Microsoft asking them whether Excel works on the IBM ThinkPad and see how long it will take before you get an answer.

We could be full time answering questions whose answer is on our site and this is just not doable. Given the past history of PalmOne, it is safe assumption that if we don't yet list support for it on our site, it does not work yet.

Again it is possible to do better as Microsoft has demonstrated on the Pocket PC. One day we will become tired of developing software for a hardware vendor who constantly puts us in an uncomfortable and undeserved situation. Moreover, it does not take a supercomputer to see where a software investment may be more profitable when a single version works on a hundred different devices from different vendors.