Hello everyone!
I'm sure some of you were wondering if I really
existed or whether I was just a product of John Gent's imagination.
Its been great to see the response on this
mail list, and I thought the first thing I should share with you are my
thoughts on the list itself.
I've seen a couple questions on what's going to
happen to this list?
Well ... eventually MRS is going to have to
take over responsibility for the list So at the very least, its going
to necessitate a server change at some point. But we'd like to take it
further than that. Currently there are only 333 subscribers to the list
and not all of them are even SmartCAM customers. Even so,
that's only a tiny fraction of the number of people we estimate who
are still using SmartCAM in the world today. What we'd like to do is
make it a membership based list that's for active customers and
subscribers and other key SmartCAM community members. That way we
will be able to share more confidential support information and business
planning information with the list than I feel we currently can give
out, given the current list membership. (I'm sure
the gentleman from Gibbs who is a current member of the
list would understand.)
I see membership in the list being
included if you're a part of the 'current' customer base. That
means if you're on active maintenance or
have a current version from MRS that includes
maintenance you would automatically have free membership. If
you were a customer but not active, in other words, you have an
older version and you're not on maintenance, then you could join the list
for a small admin fee. If however you're not really a
customer, dealer or some other trusted member of the community (but
say a competitor for instance) you would not be allowed membership to the
list. I understand that things we publish to the list will
eventually get out if someone wants it bad enough, I just don't want to
mail it to them directly.
I'd like to see the list continue to carry the
kinds of technical discussions and Q&A that it currently does, but I'd
also like to develop it as primary vehicle for delivering company and product
announcements, tech tips, support info, etc. For it to be truly
effective however we need to expand it to include a much larger
segment of the customer base. This can have both positive and
negative effects. It makes for a much larger knowledge pool to tap into,
but it might also have the effect of lowering the standards for communications
on the list.
That leads me to list etiquette. This
list has always operated at a very high level. If the list membership
begins to expand, we would like to count on the original membership to set an
example and help maintain that high level of integrity. We see the
members of this list as probably being the most representative of the type of
customer we want to have and keep. Surprisingly, when we conducted our
survey last year, we discovered there are still a small number of
SmartCAM users who are completely unconnected with no internet or email at
work OR at home. Unfortunately we may have to leave some of them
behind. We aren't going to have the resources to do onsite
visits. We will need to conduct a lot more business (product and
services) over the phone and internet.
Finally, I saw a comment in one of the earlier
responses to 'buy American'. I want to remind
everyone that SmartCAM is a worldwide product, and the membership of this
list reflects that. We all need to remain aware of that as we
post here. Now, having said that, I think I understand the
sentiment behind the statement, so given the global nature
of SmartCAM, I think the phrase 'support a living wage' conveys that same sentiment
and honors the global nature of this forum, and is something we support here
at MRS.
Thanks again for all the encouraging
responses,
--gregg
