Quote:
Originally Posted by EowynCarter
Having spoken in person with peaple from bookeen, tjhat's not true.
Had they been secretive, the answer would have been "soon" rather than "next week".
Name me a company that tell, weeks earliers "hey, we're going to publish an update at date X". Oh, wait, bookeen did, and that's why evryone is so furious after them, because it got delayed for some reason.
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They may have their reasons and they may be good, no one will dispute that. From the human point of view I am sure they are very good people. But from the commercial point of view, this does not work well. I believe that the best way to push a product is to heavily sponsor it, wherever you can, however you can, within the financial means you have and all the other constraints you may have. You have to create a community and nurture it, so that the customer shall have more and more support than the company in itself might be able to deliver. I believe that this works even better if you are a small company which cannot compete with the likes of Sony and Amazon.
(It would probably be even better if they really posted all the sources and worked for plugin support. I am pretty sure that somebody would try to port some other application, ebook reader and I do not see that as bad. Think on having the Calibre lit reader availabe, wouldn' t it be nice ? But this is still in future.)
Having said that, I do not understand what is stopping them from writing "we are working on this and that, and we got some problems in this and that". It' s like the progress bar in some Windows application, it may not be useful to understand the completion rate, but it lets you feel that something is happening. It is like a psychological Linus quilt that will let them appear open to the customers and gain more widespread access. I do not believe it will hurt them; the machine
is already good enough!
Some of these failures to communicate is fast becoming apparent; there is an email in some forum of a customer with a Cybook with a newer firmware release, who has a problem, but he/she cannot reflash his firmware, because it is not available as a reflashable download, and will have to send it back to Booken. This will not create a happy customer, also if they send the item back the next day, totaly repaired and full of bonuses. Human nature is such that you remember best the worst thigs and not the good things. That is way I believe you should try to avoid the bad publicity.