Quote:
Originally Posted by Tweakhead
I agree with Darryl.
and since we're all going to be beta-testers I take it we'll all get a discount (or free) updates for a year - rather than the annual $399 "support" fee.
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Past users/testers of buggy code are going to want back-payment :)
I want to see Avid making money, but paying a company to report bugs in their software always grates with me. But having product managed complex software products (e.g. early VMware products) I could not imagine every not having a public beta on major new software releases. And for participants in the beta I would never want to charge them to report problems. Computer configuration management is such a mess that you just often can't catch enough corner problems on smaller private betas, yet those corner problems can affect lots of production users with a large enough user base. What private betas can be great for is making sure you know folks are deep testing some new feature/change in their specific environments (especially anybody asking for that change). Or good at checking the known unknowns in Rumsfeld speak, but not good for checking the unknown unknowns. ...so I do seriously like Avid running a public beta for this (but they should make it possible for anybody using that to report a bug).