on 11/27/00 11:28 AM, stephen at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> should i be glad or dismayed ??
As 'nice' as it is for MacMillan to distribute Mandrake products, with all
the recent snafus (most of them deliberate decisions by marketing) I think
it's about time that MacMillan be abandonned as a reliable source of
distributions, and that those needing the latest Mandrake either just
download it (time notwithstanding -- this is what Mandrake folks are
suggesting anyway) or buy the cheap burnt CDs from providers like
LinuxCentral. In fact, I received latest version CD-ROMs from their US
distribution support guy (Thanks, Christopher), and those worked fine, after
the MacMillan package I paid good money for proved useless.
The only problem with that scenario is that because of this, Mandrake will
obviously no longer make any money from those US sales it loses this way -
thus, it would be preferable if Mandrake installed some system to either
sell directly to end users, or accept some sort of electronic payment for
those using their products, that downloaded them, and that want Mandrake to
get some money.
My prediction on that front : Marketing won't have *ANY* clue what to do,
and will not address this. Accounting will dance around the issue, because
they don't know what to do, or how to handle such income. Legal won't let
them, because "That's not how things get done". (insert appropriate French
translations here -- but essentially this is how this would break within a
US infrastructure). Change probably won't happen until the first really bad
reviews of MacMillan distros start hitting, and sales decline sharply -
which could be a while since Mandrake has built some good momentum.
I'd actually hope the above scenario would not play out, and they figure
some way to address them...
Harry
