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lowlander is not online. Last active: 7/21/2009 7:43:47 AM lowlander
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last days in lifecycle
Posted: 21 Jul 2009 07:43 AM
I'm surprised to still see a few people around here. I though way back in the early 2000s that asksam would be bound to doom. Their attempts to broaden their product base with QSite and Citation failed, Webpublisher has never emerged as a killer web app, either. At the same time, they never had managed their core askSam product to be on par with the latest developments in Windows desktop software. It trailed the pack ever since the early attempts to migrate asksam from DOS to Windows 3.1. The core idea of the product, its full-text capabilities and ad-hoc database creation, is as appealing as it has ever been, yet its relative value has decreased with the ubiquity of full-text search capabilities on desktop operating systems, both web and desktop- based applications and search-engines.
With Citation, askSam and SurfSaver in their hands, they once had the opportunity to build *the* scholar's productivity tool per se if they had got it right.

These days, asksam appears to be in the last meters of its lifecycle. They still might generate some revenue from legacy users by adding low hanging fruits to their products. Those, who are in a long-ranging need of a tool, have already migrated or will likely do so in the future. The actors on top of the deck have left the drowning ship. Eric Sites, asksams leading developer and software architect left the company in 2004. Phil Schnyder, still listed as CEO and president on asksam's web site, has hired at Avanquest Software in Paris, France, back in 2006.
sovi007 is not online. Last active: 11/20/2009 12:58:56 PM sovi007
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Re: last days in lifecycle
Posted: 21 Jul 2009 08:29 AM
Well, this is depressing. I've posted myself about the relative solitude here for months now.

Anyone at asksam care to chime in regarding the company, the lack of website updates, and the plans for asksam 8 alpha, and so on?
mulberryfan is not online. Last active: 9/1/2009 10:21:56 AM mulberryfan
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Re: last days in lifecycle
Posted: 21 Jul 2009 02:43 PM
Sovi007 wrote:
"Anyone at asksam care to chime in regarding the company, the lack of website updates, and the plans for asksam 8 alpha, and so on?"

Well, frankly, I think they owe their customers a number of fixes for AS 7 rather than asking them to pay to upgrade to AS8.
Fred is not online. Last active: 9/29/2009 5:44:12 AM Fred
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Re: last days in lifecycle
Posted: 22 Jul 2009 10:09 AM
Hi,

what you say, Lowlander, is terrible ; nobody here it seems had been aware of your information ; I would certainly not having gone into my detailed analysis and suggestion making last december, had I knew this !

But all of what you say, and notably those two defections, puts things here into perspective. Now it becomes much clearer why Paul and his collegue have so much troube to edit the "spaghetti code" as I supposed it to be : it's not even theirs, they are replacements for the former developers who, as you state it, left the sinking ship ! And of course, in those circumstances, it is an illusion to think the owners would be willing to rehaul the program, in order to make it fit for the current marketplace !

You say, at one time they had it all, for scientists and researchers ( it was scholars the term you employed ), with three programs but that were not in synch, and they spoiled it : 100 p.c. d'accord with you ! And I have got only one possible reason for all this : The owners = the original developer and his family, at some moment, seem to have wanted nothing more than a revenue stream for their old days, instead of investing, hence the defections and "cheap" replacements - this seems very unrespectful to Paul and his coding collegue, and I do not want it to be that : I only want to express that once upon a time, there had been people with a vision there ( but perhaps with poor encoding technology ), and now it's up to Paul and his collegue to encode just the strict minimum, and nobody allows them to develop any visionary things, and they have to cope with old ( spaghetti or not ) code not from them and perhaps very poorly documented.

Of course, Mulberryfan, you are right in demanding there must be a version 7.1., without all those bugs, before they would have any right to ask for more money, but Sovi007 was indeed asking for just a hint of the future of AS, AS 8 alpha being "in what direction are you going, let us know !", but then we all know that AS people did never ever say anything about such subjects : AS users were very happy when even their bug fixes came along. This notwithstanding, I would be very interested in having exactly the answer to the questions he put. By the way, Sovi had for months a way of reminding, has this been addressed, and that, and that, or that neither, etc., when in fact, his latest contribution ( before this ), some days ago, has been much more elaborated than that, and I would like to acknowledge that.

AS people always pretend having 350.000 users, it's on top on their home page ( = very first page of asksam.com ), so money should be there, but not for spending with the product ; they hadn't shown any serious reaction to all those hints given by Flo and others, not speaking of mine, so why dig deeper ?

When I am always having a look upon this site, it's for two or three reasons :

- Some day, in the past, they had a real good product, and I simply cannot understand why people could abandon such a good thing : so it's in desperate hope ;

- They never even tried to censor me even when I put things very bluntly, so it seems to me there are decent people : Back to reason 1 : Decent people should be able to change their mind, in order to try to make it, finally... and Heaven knows they have got a legion of well-minded and not-so-stupid people in order to help them to succeed.

- There is a third reason : they always have the developer edition ( which they try to sell for a lot of extra money ), so there must be the technical possibility left for getting back the AS for DOS programmability in AS for Windows, so first they should incorporate the functionality of the developer kit into the regular ( = professional ) version, abandoning their hopes to make that crap extra money ( and then, in the current state of affairs, I do not thing a lot of people by it, but once programmability is back into AS, a lot of people would suddenly be again interested in it, I think ).

Sovi is right with his observation some days ago, it's come to a real desert here. But then, almost every day, this page pretends to have a dozen or so newly registered user, when in fact everybody has reading access to the postings, so why would so many people be interested in registering here ? But they do, it seems, so there seem to be a lot of people interested in being informed of the development of this software : another reason to finally get the gargantuan work of making it fit done !

And there had been, some weeks ago, a rather lengthy posting of one of the superior AS staff here but that got by almost unnoticed. There, it was stated that AS staff IS taking into account our remarks ( well, they never really did, right ? ), and that they finally had found the most notable bug, driving so many people crazy in order to defect.

It has been virtually after this posting that this forum has been so void : why ? I do not use AS any more ( as I told here months ago ), and hence I have not got the guts to do hours and hours of trying out ( built 143 ) in order to see for myself if those bugs have gone, or not, but I had expected that remaining AS users would state here, wow, it's finally working, or it has this and that tiny bug left, but it's a great step ahead, I'm rather happy now !

No, nothing, even not any more bug information, except for installation problems ( and installation problems are not new to AS either ). So I am asking myself - and here I critized my fellow posters in this regard months ago -, why do rather satisfied people do not post, this and that bug has gone, it's not as sh*t any more, I even come to like it a little bit again ?!

I would do so, thus informing other people of the bad AND of the good developments, but that info is absent here. So isn't there any big chance in the unreliability of AS ? Remember, some people, some months ago, reported about one crash per hour AND found that acceptable since they stated they didn't lose data !

Yep, that was crazy, and now it's quite sheer silence ! I do not understand, and I would like to be better informed !

And even Ben, Paul and Flo do not post anymore, except for very rare exceptions, but then, all of them are daily here, looking the new postings up for ( kindly ) intervening if necessary.

So, all of this tends to be an artificial silence, when in fact everybody is waiting for things to come, to come from somebody else.

So let's ask AS people, what's going on, and let's ask current users, are there real problems left ? There are people out there who are interested in your statements !

Kind Regards to Everybody
Fred is not online. Last active: 9/29/2009 5:44:12 AM Fred
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Re: last days in lifecycle
Posted: 22 Jul 2009 10:26 AM
No, there isn't any big chance in the unreliabilty of AS, and even I do not search for one, but I was asking if there isn't any big CHANGE in the unreliability of AS : it had been that a bit complicated term that drove my attention too much to it, so that change got chance. "And then, in the current state of affairs, I do not think a lot of people buy it", that developer edition, I wanted to say ; pardon me !
mfelix is not online. Last active: 11/19/2009 5:48:04 AM mfelix
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Re: last days in lifecycle
Posted: 23 Jul 2009 07:25 AM
Did you have a look at the member list of the forum ?
My impression is that the names chosen by the latest registrations are rather strange.
So strange in fact that it would be hard for me to reminder such a name at all.
Go back and look at the very first few pages of member registrations and you will see what I mean.

In addition very few of these new "members" do actually post.
Normally it is exactly the other way round: you register because you have a problem and you post immediately.

I seriously doubt that these new members are real users of askSam !

Up to the newbies to refute me :-))
sovi007 is not online. Last active: 11/20/2009 12:58:56 PM sovi007
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Re: last days in lifecycle
Posted: 23 Jul 2009 07:51 AM
Gone president, lost developer, old news, no updates, fabricated forum users....

Anybody got a bugle?

I don't think anyone would be this sad at this if the product weren't so interesting, still.
sovi007 is not online. Last active: 11/20/2009 12:58:56 PM sovi007
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Re: last days in lifecycle
Posted: 24 Jul 2009 01:56 PM
I'll do like Fred and append my own post-

A lot of software programs have 3rd party support forums that are essentially enthusiast sites, hosted on yahoo groups or elsewhere, where real support and ideas are exchanged.

This doesn't have to mean that the corporate boards like this one are not of use, it just means that users or fans want their own place to stretch their legs and make it useful as they see fit.

Anyone start something like this for asksam? Are there any other places to go for excitement and ideas?
mulberryfan is not online. Last active: 9/1/2009 10:21:56 AM mulberryfan
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Re: last days in lifecycle
Posted: 25 Jul 2009 02:45 PM
Sovi, I'm a little puzzled by your suggestion of a Yahoo groups support forum for AskSam. My experience has been that people form Yahoo Groups forums when either there's no other option or the corporate forum is highly censored and doesn't permit criticism of the program. Neither of those conditions seems to apply here. So why have TWO places where users need to look for info, and (perhaps even more important) two places where Paul and other tech support people have to check and respond in? I don't think the problem is this forum--it's the unresponsiveness of AskSam's management to the problems people have repeatedly called to their attention and the suggestions for improvements that are all too often ignored.

I'm a relative newcomer to AskSam, having started with version 7. I fell in love with the ease with which I could make databases, and I went on from there to explore other ways AskSam could be useful for me. I'm still enthusiastic about the program, though its uncorrected bugs increasingly trouble me and the unresponsiveness of management depresses me and prevents me from recommending AS to others. Indeed, I fear your call for a bugle may be only a little premature.
mulberryfan is not online. Last active: 9/1/2009 10:21:56 AM mulberryfan
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Re: last days in lifecycle
Posted: 25 Jul 2009 03:12 PM
I was intrigued by what mfelix reported about the "new members" of the AskSam forum, so I did as he suggested and took a look. It seems likely to me that the overwhelming majority of new members are people or bots who joined the forum in order to send spam. Apparently they weren't successful, but the names remind me of some of the names I see on another forum where I am one of the people in charge of keeping the forum spam-free. In the AskSam forum, the new members have names like BUYpharmacy, noprescription33, erotikmessen, as well as gibberish names such as havvalfowpveaglfb (or something like that--I didn't cut and paste). The amusing thing about this last name is that it is immediately preceded by 11 others--each one drops a letter from the last "member's" userid, so havvalfowpveaglfb was immediately preceded by havvalfowpveaglf, who was immediately preceded by havvalfowpveagl, etc., back to havval. It's clear that these are not real people, let alone users of AskSam.

I can also confirm one more thing that mfelix noted: almost none of the new members has posted a message. Of the most recent 300 members, only 8 have actually sent a message to the forum.
Perhaps we should be thankful, since if they HAD sent messages, they'd undoubtedly have been spam.
Fred is not online. Last active: 9/29/2009 5:44:12 AM Fred
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Re: last days in lifecycle
Posted: 26 Jul 2009 03:53 PM
WOW !

Congratulations, mfelix !

Of course, I had noticed, wondering, that almost every day about ten new inscriptions, without almost any postings from them, and I told you so, stating that reading access is for everyone, so what for their inscriptions, without postings, I asked ? But I didn't take any conclusion out of it, you did, and of course once you tell us, your conclusion is overwhelmingly convincing ! ( New usernames are not almost all in the range "buyviagra", but many of them were, so I didn't see the spam quality in almost the whole of them, so much the less as I saw only one real spam, month ago, but which had been reposted several times, by a VoiP provider looking out for resellers. )

So, that activity is a virtual one : bad, bad, bad ! ( in my previous posting, I have referred to sovi's "Few things" )


But frankly, reading your post, I immediately thought, are things that bad that AS staff now put about 10 new inscriptions per day here, in order to FAKE some life on their support site ? So my first thought was NOT spamming, but faking, which brings us to another ( very secondary ) question : Why are so many spammers able to do their inscription, but then, ain't able to do their spam thing ? Has AS staff a .jpg filter ? Or a filter for key words like "buy now" ? In this case, this post will not be shown... ;-)

Or do have AS a robot to do the new inscriptions ? That would be so pathetic !

In any case, mfelix, I am sure, hit the bull's eye ! And mulberryfan's trouvaille that many of those names seem to be triggered electronically, does not in any case interfere with my theory that AS staff ( as anybody, but where's anybody's motivation ? ) might be behind some of those new "users"... It's amusing, but secondary, but I think mfelix conclusion is first rate and of first rate importance : People who state this forum is dead, ain't wrong...


Of course, mulberryfan is right "against" sovi, another forum wouldn't resuscitate the corpse, but then, I understand sovi perfectly : It's wishful thinking, it would be of symbolic value in order to keep our hopes alive : We seem to be sitting beneath a dead body, but as long as we chant our dirges ( not knowing they are dirges, but pretending it's, say, in rites of the spring ), we don't have to acknowledge the body's temperature is rapidly sinking. ( Please allow for this analogy I am very proud of : just imagine the tableau ( painting ) ! )


There HAS BEEN ( ? ) another forum, but, well, it has been in German, accessible by

http://www.asksam.de/index.asp?page=support&img_link=6

and by

http://www.asksam.de/index.asp?page=support&img_link=5

On this ( ? ) forum, flo has been very active ( in German, of course ), but today, I get an error 404 there... ( so THAT corpse is buried, for once... )


I always said, Paul ( Wilson ) and his collegue, I meant Kevin Robinson, who doesn't appear in this forum ( ? ), whereas Paul's collegue here, Ben ( Brown ), does ( judging by the staff list ) support, but no programming, that's up to Paul ( "Application Developer" ) and Kevin ( "Programmer" ).

So, this means that Paul does the framework, and Kevin the encoding ? Some of ours, myself e.g. ( but after lengthy contributions by Flo, years ago ), have posted, here, rather detailed hints to what to do, or towards conceptual faults in what AS does ; Paul did NEVER EVER respond to any of those details ; perhaps he's not allowed to do so since AS's information politics has always been, we don't mumble a single word to you before it's out.

Some developments have been half-baked ( and faulty, but this is not a conceptional problem ), e.g. the ( virtual ) folders, but are "expandable" ( e.g. those folders I commented on in every detail here in 2008 ), but then, to do them right, developers or encoders have to be paid !

And that's where the multiple presidents and vice presidents of AS have their say, and, well, did they ever really intend to listen carefully ? I mean, is there any development in AS that has been triggered by users' wishlists' entries ? There isn't any I remember but perhaps I'm erroneous !

The AS staff posting I was referring to in my post above is from Jim Hartman, the "Director of Sales and Business Development" ; I went into the trouble to search it :

http://www.asksam.com/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9401

It is the "answer" to greybeard's question, AS 7 - Ready for Prime Time ? ( And greybeard tops it the same day, in reminding that the answer comes after almost 3 months ; he puts it more elegantly that I do the transcription here, so have a look. )

Jim's was public relations speak, as always. He sounds sincere, but there isn't any concrete stuff in it, just a lot of mumbling "we listen", and Jim's "main bug found" report, so I had ween waiting for more good things to come : as I've stated, I expected "not so bad anymore, functioning quite well" reports from semi-satisfied users.

There were none, but there were not so many other bug reports either... but here, mulberryfan refers to remaining bugs, without naming them...


Let's have another few days' patience, but we discuss things here, WITHOUT any intervening thirds, NOT Ben / Paul / Flo who are listed as daily onlookers though, NOT AS directors, of marketing or of development, let alone some of the owners, i.e. some McKinneys, NOR any AS users, while there are thousands of them with the inscription to write.

If new inscriptions are triggered automatically ( by whomever ), if Phil Schnyder is in Paris, doing delepment and strategy for Avanquest

( Well, I must say it, some month ago, I had been interested in a database from Avanquest since it had been offered for free somewhere, I think it was in a special edition of "c't", so I did some research, and the database, costing some 40 euros = 55 dollars or so ( remember, I had it for free ), if I remember well, wasn't as tremendous as that, and the Avanquest site was so multi-colored, and they had so many "semi-professional" products, i.e. products I wouldn't have for free, that I never installed that free database, be it free or not, Avanquest seeming, to my eye, to want to appeal to "le grand public", i.e. the masses, so Avanquest products were stricly not for me. So, Phil Schnyder, there, is perhaps in a "good" entity making money, but I don't have the impression he is in an avantgarde entity doing the next AS, the next google, the next real thing. This puts things into perspective, I dare say : Paul without any development money is perhaps as good or as bad as Phil without development money : mourning the loss of Phil is perhaps over-respectful to Phil, and disrespectful to Paul : it's the McKinney's development money's lack où le bât blesse ! ),

if semi-satisfied users do not even bother anymore to say so , yeh, we're semi-satisfied and thus will buy version 8,

well, then indeed we risk whining a corpse here, without knowing.


When in February, I amused myself in braving the nerves of Katrina, she told us a very interesting thing : her little company was paying, she said, if I remember well, 4-digits amounts to AS every year for a thing called "individual support" or something like that. Thus, she angrily said, she is very well authorized to expect her corrupted AS files to be brought in order by AS staff !

But then, of course she is ! But so, we understand better why AS has Paul and Ben in "technical support" even when this support forum isn't really working anymore, and why the McKinneys just do some versions 7, 8, 9... without much looking upon their "quality for money" value, in spite of just burying AS for good :

Little companies like Katrina's which not only buy new versions, but that renew their support contracts, can make the difference for the McKinneys...

...as long as AS's defunct competitors of the Nineties remain dead, and the rising competitors from the outliners / PIMs fields ain't able to attract customers in sufficient numbers in order to generate the revenue stream necessary to develop something like AS's ( theoretically unequalled ) search functionality.

So, the McKinneys seem to think that anyway, AS is doomed by new developments in more actively developing software houses, and that up to then, just the strict minimum development money is to spent : It's like a transport company whose trucks fall to pieces because the owner knows there's railway track coming in some years, and no consideration of retaining customers by offering them the best product : ain't trucks much more able to do individual service, that the railway, especially for middle-sized customers, not speaking of the little ones ?

Which is to say, yes, AS is doomed... ( by its Scottish ? I know it's a cliché... ) stinginess...

or it will have to incorporate all functionality in it of which its owners dispose : Why doing an Electronic Publisher, for a lot of money ? Why a Resume Tracker ? ( "NEW! askSam RT6 is here!", they say today, July 26, 2009 ! ) Why a Web Publisher ( which is not even identical with the Electronic Publisher ) ? Why Citation ? Why QSite ? Why the SDK ? ( For all this, see their site and then "Products" )

And when electronic reading devices become ubiquitous, will AS do a special "Electronic Book Publisher" ?

Instead of incorporating that functionality into AS 8 ? Let's face it : AS have always tried to make a MAX of money out of even their tiniest of ideas, by fractioning the functionality of their products at will. THIS IS CYNICAL. So why don't they lose their customers' goodwill when producing and marketing those CRIPPLED AND BUG-RIDDEN products ?

Crippled alone : ok if they are slick, perfect in their respective diminutive range ( by the way, Resume Tracker 6 = "new" even more than one year after AS 7 : the didn't DARE to bring out RT with those bugs, recruiting being a business where liability can become expensive ).

Bug-ridden alone ? ok ( no, not really, but not a criminal offence ) when you see they are really interested in defending the interests of their customers, but that doesn't seem to be the case when every functionality has to be bought separately ( and then, years ago, customers have been complaining about the stinginess of the normal and the "professional" versions differentiation ).

So what ? Crippled and bug-ridden, and 4-digit maintenance fees for the tiniest of companies like Katrina's ?

Are they serious ? Or is Lowlander PERFECTLY right ? He said, "some vintage users". Yep, we are in the vast majority here. But are we serious anymore ?
mfelix is not online. Last active: 11/19/2009 5:48:04 AM mfelix
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Re: last days in lifecycle
Posted: 27 Jul 2009 06:15 AM
Fred, you're absolutely right about the German askSam forum.
I had a direct link to it, but it's not working anymore.

Surely Flo will know more about it !
Fred is not online. Last active: 9/29/2009 5:44:12 AM Fred
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Re: last days in lifecycle
Posted: 30 Jul 2009 08:48 AM
Yep. ;-)

Concerning Flo, see his highly amusing intervention just today :

http://www.asksam.com/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9679.

It highlights that AS "is" crazy, or at least seems to be, but then, Flo detects there's a bug difference between 8-character and more-than-8-character field contents, and that seems to show the bug is from 1993 ( again ! ), from AS's DOS-to-Windows transition, 8bit, 16bit, 32bit, whatever : that very old code must be h*ll for Paul, Ben and all !

And Flo's post shows again that he really digs deep : incredible ! I'm more than impressed, again !

Well, AS officers, when do we get some encouraging ( and specific comments ) ? It's time for them, I think. Nope ? Szeequing out the last drops, as lowlander has suggested, and as I, in the absence of any ( = any, or any valuable ) reaction from yours would tend to suppose also ?

Are you REALISING at least that we try to HELP you, in e.g. my giving you the hint to end that ugly fractionising of your product line, but to give us programmability back, for a start ?!

Hein ?
Radmdau is not online. Last active: 9/1/2009 6:56:07 PM Radmdau
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Re: last days in lifecycle
Posted: 01 Sep 2009 09:24 AM
Well, I can assure you, that I am, in fact a user. Or rather, a user in waiting - as soon as someone tells me how to resolve what is probably a very stupid thing on my part. I've had AS for a while, but have waited to use it - out of laziness, i suppose. Actually setting up a db, rather than doing things as I have.

AS is still virtually unknown outside of a select group of people. I have yet ot mention it to anyone who knew it - but all thought the idea great. But, most of those people don't write much, or do research. So, the money for AS is better spent, in their minds, for something else.

But, we're still out here.

Lynn
ssalo is not online. Last active: 10/15/2009 8:34:29 AM ssalo
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Re: last days in lifecycle
Posted: 15 Oct 2009 08:33 AM
It would be thoughtful of the AskSam folks to give us an official reply to this very depressing thread. I have been using AS since 1988, so as you can imagine, my entire research life is on AS. If there is any other product that is as useful for storing, searching, retrieving, and manipulating information, I have not found it.
mfelix is not online. Last active: 11/19/2009 5:48:04 AM mfelix
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Re: last days in lifecycle
Posted: 15 Oct 2009 10:06 AM
Has anybody been in contact with asksam folks recently ?

I can't find a trace of them within this forum and I'm even under the impression that its quite some time since the last asksam news letter (maybe I'm wrong) came around.
sovi007 is not online. Last active: 11/20/2009 12:58:56 PM sovi007
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Re: last days in lifecycle
Posted: 19 Oct 2009 09:07 AM
The newsletter?? since when has that been up-to-date? I really don't recall it ever being ahead of any curve. It's supposed to be about asksam, and then you get tips like "back up your computer" or "here is some drawing software" or "how to set your clock". Well, not literally, but just about along those lines.

I have not seen a trace of A/S people in months. I'm assuming they're stopped production, and are paying the webhosting so as not to appear totally gone.

Until I see otherwise, I'm left with no clue, and even less hope at this point.
joe19 is not online. Last active: 11/18/2009 10:55:08 AM joe19
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Re: last days in lifecycle
Posted: 19 Oct 2009 11:25 AM
It is a shame if your news is true. BUT I still like the product (at least to version 6.1.2). It is invaluable to me to track the various tech knowledge I need. Unlike some users, AS has never failed me! I have never lost a file or record or any data. I know I'm not as heavy a user as some, I only have 100's of records not 1000's. But it does what i need and it does it well. Quite frankly, to add bells and whistles is fine, but products like MS Word and such, that constantly add stuff just to make us buy new, angers me. All I end up doing is relearning to do what I did before and I rarely use the new stuff!! Yes fixing bugs is a must but that never stopped Microsoft!!! AND as a product that has cost so little compared to others, I have gotten my money's worth. And if all that is left is ACCESS, please just shoot me!!!
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