by RollerBall » Sun Nov 05, 2006 12:32 pm
What a marketing disaster FSX is. Many hundreds of $000s spent in developing and promoting the product and the hard core of its market is now told that
- we should have expected problems and software glitches
- we should NOT have expected to be able to run it on the hardware we have or are expect to have available to us in the reasonably foreseeable future (and which probably a very large minority at least of its core market will NEVER have access to)
- that it is actually a work in progress towards some unspecified goal to be used on currently unavailable technology at some unspecified time in the future
- that unless we are grateful and give em our money now, development would just be stopped
- that we should stop saying nasty things about it and the people who have created it (and who have very well paid jobs in one of the biggest, most successful and most profitable companies the world has ever seen), because it's a tough job writing games software these days
- it would have been a much better product if the suits had not become involved and said it has to make money
BTW, I'm paraphrasing and converting Unofficial-MS-PR-speak into everyday language here.
Now let's deal with this tdragger thing. There has been nothing yet to suggest other than MS knew that there would be problems with FSX's core market when it was launched, as indeed there have been, and that he was one of several company members who were put in place where they could directly communicate with the core market (ie 'personal' blogs and various fs forums) to 'smooth the way'. Various people 'in the know' have said as much and that is what has been implied here on SimV. Now you can call this and the people who questioned the policy what you like, but is it ethical marketing? And how can the boobies on the receiving end be blamed when they began to see this ploy for what it was, here and on other flightsim forums, and the policy was apparently hastily reconsidered and the guys like tdragger were withdrawn.
And please don't try and say that that's a wrong interpretation of the facts - getting a bit tired of that one when more and more is being said by guys with 'inside' contacts which indicate it to be true. Look, nobody likes being found out.
Better surely to get the product right and ready for sale and then launch it, than to launch it with known problems and then try to bluff your way out of it with vague promises of assistance and 'it'll be sorted like all MS products' in some unspecified way and some unspecified time in the future. After all, we know from another one of these 'in the know' characters that scant regard was paid by the marketing company to many of the serious comments made before launch by its beta testers, so why should things have changed now?
And just one last thing. People around here are getting fed up with being accused of 'pissing and whining' to coin a phrase when they make comments as users of a product they have spent their hard-earned money on. I see that Phil Taylor of ACES, when asked elsewhere about the totally unrealistic claims on the box about the minimum spec needed to run the software said, 'We will just have to disagree on that one'. You then have to imagine the smile and the knowing wink. Yeah, right.
Many hundreds of thousands of people will go into their Computer and Games shops this Christmas and buy this product on the basis of that information. The great majority of them will not be hard-core flight simmers and they won't be along to forums like this to 'piss and whine'. They will just throw it in the drawer and just say with a sigh, 'OK, yeah - caught again'.
I think it's lucky that there are people who can 'piss and whine' on their behalf and are ready to take companies on, big as they are and whoever they are, who think that it's OK to tell institutional fibbs just so long as you don't get found out.
I've been quiet lately on this because I'd made my points earlier on, but I'm getting fed up of all the pseudo semi-official bluster that's coming out now that this one has been.
Look, MS - just get on with it, fix the problems with the product and make an honest statement about the minimum system needed to run the software, especially as you're now apparently running a heavy TV campaign in the States and maybe other countries soon. Save us the cr*p and semi-official PR which seems on this forum at least now to be taking up more server space than the 'pissers and whiners'.
I think that's a pretty reasonable request, don't you?
BTW, I apologise for this somewhat offensive phrase, but it wasn't mine.
Just one more last thing.
I don't have any contracts with MS and I don't sell any products that directly or indirectly depend for their success on me being 'in the loop' with MS, for pre-releases and all that kind of stuff. That's not so true for some of the guys who are banging the MS drum in a pretty big way around here just now. Now as for whether that should be interpreted as 'vested interests' or not is not for me to say...
Last edited by RollerBall on Sun Nov 05, 2006 1:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
) but let's take what we've got - & build. 
Gauge Programming - 3d Modeling Eaglesoft Development Group 