At 04:38 PM 2/8/2002 -0500, Watnoski, Michael wrote: > Was Accel so bad that they went out of business, or so good that >Protel was so desperate for a useable package that they offered so much to >buy them that they couldn't refuse? I think the latter.
Neither of these is a good description of what happened. Accel was, I understand, losing money, but, obviously, they never went out of business. The price Protel offered was, again obviously, large enough that it was accepted, but I don't think it was over-generous. My impression was that Accel investors lost money, but not as much as they would have lost if trends had continued and they had not accepted the offer. I nearly fell over when I first read about the acquisition. Accel got started as a sales rep for Protel Easytrax, marketed in the U.S. as Tango. Then they dropped Protel and came out with Tango Series II, a rewritten knock-off which competed with Protel Autotrax. It was better than Autotrax in some respects and worse in others. Obviously, Accel effectively stole the U.S. Protel market. I very much doubt that what they did was in accord with the spirit of the original sales agreement, but it probably did not technically violate it, else Protel would have had an easy time in court. Tango, however, never recovered fully from the crash programming effort; within a couple of years, maintaining the spaghetti code that had been rushed out became impractical, and everything was rewritten. And then Accel acquired PCAD, to the dismay of many PCAD users. I was a Tango user. In fact, I wrote the book on Tango, so to speak. It remained on the Accel web site until quite recently. I did not move on to TangoPro as indications were, from other professional users, that it would not improve my productivity. And it was expensive, compared to Tango. Eventually, though, my client base shrank to the point that I had to move on, and I chose Protel 98. I have never regretted that choice; I was productive with design the first hours I was using Protel 98. And then Accel users were likewise dismayed at the purchase by Protel; PADS attempted to lure these users away with a very generous cross-grade offer (i.e., no cross-grade cost, pay only one year's maintenance for PADS). As part of that effort, PADS made some statements about the likely future of PCAD and Protel sued them.... It's obvious that maintaining two separate packages with major overlap is not particularly efficient, so I'd expect to see more and more convergence, as another writer also noted. There *is* a market, I think, for two separate programs, which would become bundles, essentially. There might ultimately be two separate user interfaces with the same underlying servers. Or one of the interfaces will go into the trash bin, but that would be expensive for the users. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Abdulrahman Lomax Easthampton, Massachusetts USA * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * To post a message: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * To leave this list visit: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/leave.html * * Contact the list manager: * mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * Forum Guidelines Rules: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/forumrules.html * * Browse or Search previous postings: * http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
