From: drdan@src.honeywell.com
Subject: Re: Eudora Support
X-Sender: drdan@draco.src.honeywell.com
To: comp.sys.mac.comm
Posted-Date: Mon, 14 Dec 92 10: 13:57 CST
Organization: mailEnteringNews at Honeywell SRC
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1992 16:13:57 GMT
Received-Date: Mon, 14 Dec 92 10: 14:03 CST

For myself, an important reason in forcing a choice of commercial software
over comparable shareware or freeware is not short-term support, it is
long-term support. As you may deduce from the wording of the previous
sentence, my bias is towards using shareware or freeware when possible.

I try to look a year or two downstream. I've noticed that in my work,
software has about a half-life of about a year (e.g. in a year, any given
package has a 50% probability of being upgraded). That may be because of an
increase in capabilities, but it often may be to maintain compatibility
(e.g. System 7, new Powerbook, mutual bugs and interference between
applications and extensions...). What if the application stops being
upgraded? For example, I still see MacWrite and MacPaint files, so I have
to keep the capability to cope with them. They are easy. I don't know how I
would cope with Revisionist 1.4 files (for example) in 4 years.

If a package stops being upgraded, in a year it has a 50% chance of being
"subpar", in two years it has a 50% chance of being "obsolete", in four
years it has a 50% chance of being "dangerous". There are two problems with
obsolete packages. One is dealing with the old data. The other is that
users aren't happy when they have to learn a new application to do an old
function. As often as once per two years, and they feel "jacked around".

The fact is that shareware is much more likely to be discontinued then
commercial, even factoring in the individual's commitment to the product.
Consider Disinfectant. A wonderful product, but right now John Norstad has
to spend his time on other things for his employer. To date he has been
able to maintain it, but he hasn't been able to upgrade it. Newswatcher had
to be dropped by its orginator, Steve Falkenburg. It has been picked up by
others, but it's future will continue to be buffeted by the winds of
availability and interest.

Consider Eudora. Unless Qualcomm starts treating it as a profit source, I
can't depend on its future (if Qualcomm were to start having cost problems,
it has to drop marginal efforts to survive). For Eudora the file format
problem doesn't exist, because we have a long term committment to Unix and
the Internet, and the Eudora files can be simply transmitted to a unix box,
and we can go back to using "mail" or emacs (yugh). So I recommend it to
individuals who like good elegant email packages.

However, I can't promote Eudora as our in-house standard (that role is
filled by MS Mail), because I can't make a reasonable guarantee that a year
from now we won't have to change to a different application because
---future scenario--- Steve Dorner had to work full time on a make-or-break
project for Qualcomm and the last version of Eudora was incompatible with
the version of MacTCP we had to use to be compatible with SNMP.

Daniel P. Johnson          Honeywell Systems and Research Center
email: drdan@src.honeywell.com  phone: 612-951-7427  fax: 612-951-7438
mail: MN65-2500, 3660 Technology Drive, Minneapolis, MN  55418
Quote: Truth always finds a natural way of telling her story,
       and a natural way is an effective way, simple or not. --Charles Ives

Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.comm