Why Should Users Have To Pay To Be Beta Testers?
Interesting reply by Erik De Keyser regarding the future of BricsCAD and the IntelliCAD community, and the information about the new engine in V8. You claim you are doing all the developement with this new engine, but the IntelliCAD web site announced in Dec. 2007 the release of IntelliCAD V7 ALPHA. Their description of the new engine is the same as your V8. And they just announced that they expect to complete work on the V7 release for Q2 of 2009.So, what's my point? It seems to me that Bricsys decided to jump the gun with this new engine in ALPHA, and let their customers unknowingly become the BETA testers. Mr. De Keyser admits that there were many problems (as anyone who purchased V8 knows), but with the release of V9, things are almost finished. Well, I bought V8 expecting it to be a functional product. When I reported a bug, I was told it was already known, and a fix would be in an upcoming release. Well, the last release of V8 came out with no fix for my task. But guess what is in the list of updates for V9? I wrote to support about the promised release for my version, and the response was "you'll have to get V9, but we'll reduce the upgrade price for you".I've been a user of BrisCAD since 2000, and have generally been pleased with the product. However, this episode stinks. Mr. De Keyser concluded his message with "We do our utter best to keep you on our side." If that were really true, anyone who purchased V8 should be getting a license to V9 gratis.
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I thought my text was clear enough. To be more precise, we are not using code at all from IntelliCAD V7 not in the past not now and not in the future. And I repeat I can't and I won't do any statement about IntelliCAD. We want them to be successful too. So your assumptions about being unknowingly the Beta tester for the IntelliCAD ALPHA is 100% wrong. Bricscad V8,V9 has a brand new CAD engine, new DCL, new interface, new use of DWGdirect libraries, new..., and that is written and owned by Bricsys.Regarding our policy. We are as transparent as we can about what is new in each version, what the improvements are and what the bug fixes are. Everyone can try out for 30 days our software. we keep older versions available and some people decided to stay with V7 for a while, that's fine too. We have no aggressive upgrade policy we don't force people to follow with each upgrade.I think our upgrade pricing is fair: for a Classic version it is 165US$ or 150€. One can upgrade from even the earliest version, also from Bricscad 2000: it will cost 310 US$ or 260€. V8, V9 has a totally new foundation for the future, I will not explain again. It was not just another regular upgrade. From a user perspective the product has a bit the same features of course than the V6,V7. From a developers perspective the product is 500,000 lines of new code to be written, and probably another 600,000 lines of new test code, all needed to be able to keep our customers compatible with the new DWG libraries of the ODA, or in other words to keep them compatible with the future evolution of DWG -CAD.We try to explain as transparent as we can what happened and I tell you as well that we can't do all this for free. But we offer everyone the freedom to choose the right moment to upgrade or to go back to V7 for a while and decide later.A software company develops a product that frankly never is finished. The continuous development cost is paid by new licenses and upgrades. The balance of all that has to be fair or people decide to leave. We do our best to stay in line with that principle, now and in the future.Regarding support: each support request is taken serious. It gets a tag number and a priority check and is stored in the database linked with the customers record - that way we can retrieve the history of a problem at all times. When we publish the bug fixes - on average every three to four weeks - we mention the tag of the problem so you can recognise your request. Most relevant problems arrive in a knowledge base. And then there is this forum where some of our users are so gentle to help each other, and in a lot of cases help us as well. Some requests can't be solved immediately because the code is not ready for it. And it might happen as well that sometimes we fail to response on time, for which cases I apologise.But I know as well that we can't satisfy everyone. If the balance for you is flipping in the "leave"- direction, we regret that very much, sincerely. But what else can we do than respect your decision and wish for you that you find a better balance with another provider. In such case we still will do whatever we can to win you back - in a friendly way - with the best quality product we are able to. Promised.erik
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Re: Intellicad you might remember that over a year after Bricscad had developed V6, Icad consortium bought their technology. By Q2 2009 they may have the V9 of Bricscad.. or not, I for one will only watch them inch along.
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I think it's absurd to describe version 8 as a beta test. All software has bugs, especially all cad software, and many of those bugs can only be found by a wide net of users trying it with different combinations of environment and data files.I've used version 8 since it first came out. It was a little unstable at first, but has been very reliable for most of the past year. A few of the bugs I reported weren't fixed, but they involved esoteric issues that probably weren't encountered by any other users. I myself have forgotten what they were.The most important feature of the new version is the ability to open the latest dwg files. That system of annual version change was initiated by Autodesk. Competitors have no choice but to follow suit, and to bring out each new version as quickly as they can.
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