Don't forget you are expressing all this on a public forum.....
You are playing poker with your cards up on the table......
This is a sad market model. First of all, it isolates each user from others. This leaves the users as individuals (or individual companies), while the software mfr is generally larger and is aware and in some degree of communication with all users. In this vision, the mfr has, it would seem, quite an advantage. If you want to think of this as a card game, the mfr is something like a house player. We'll assume the house is not cheating, that is, the house player is not informed as to the contents of each player's hand -- unless the player shows it, as Mr. Jenkins thinks foolish -- but the house player works all day long dealing with amateurs or semi-professionals. The house player is also informed about the revealed behavior of all the other players. Quite an edge, actually.
It might seem that such a system favors the manufacturer. From the narrow view of bargaining, it does. But from the broader view of the relationship between the company and its customers, it is a fragmented and inefficeint world. Wouldn't it be better if the company and users cooperated; after all, in the end, the success of one furthers the success of the other. It is not a zero-sum game, it is not a poker game.
Far better would be the formation of a strong user group, to facilitate communication with the company. This would make the users more or less an equal equal player with the company. But how to organize such a group? It has to be efficient, for most users don't have much time to spare. And it has to be responsive to the users, it has to have a way to generate and express user consensus. I've made a rough proposal on [EMAIL PROTECTED], a long time ago. It's not going to happen just from my own initiative, for I'm only one user, and I have limited time myself. The proposal attracted maybe one response, as I recall. That's not nearly enough (unless enough users delegate authority to the active individuals).
What's been proposed is a Free Association with Delegable Proxy, a general model which is being developed for peer associations. FA/DP is described to some degree on http://beyondpolitics.org and http://beyondpolitics.org/wiki.
This is not an imposed structure, the actual form will depend on the shared vision of those who volunteer to build it. Altium could facilitate it, if the powers that be there realize the potential, but, by its nature, this has to be user-centered. It should not be a mere marketing device, but an organization that realizes the tremendous distributed resources of the users.
And a user organization, by its nature, cannot ordinarily be secretive. With an FA/DP structure, individual users remain completely free, FA/DP structures don't control the members. They are merely communication structures. But "mere" does not express the potential. Nervous systems are merely communication structures....
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