Well, it will not help most of you, but I’m really sorry for all the problems we created! I wish somebody would have followed Mr. Karl Ottenstein’s advice and would have written me a nasty e-mail, at least I could have looked to get you to better information. Apparently nobody really did it, or if somebody wrote me he/she forgot to put “very, very anger user” in the subject.

One of the problems is that most of the time nobody really writes about our products in ArchiTalk, so personally I don’t go there so often. Most of the time customers go to our own forum or write Fabrizio directly. This is a problem I will have to resolve quickly.

Concerning our reason to use now a dongle I wrote a long explanation in
http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=135080&highlight=#135080

on page4 on the same thread I answer Mr. Don Lee explaining our 3 different update forms and why we have them.
http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=135316&highlight=#135316

I don’t think I should copy/paste the text here.

I never thought that the delay could bring so many problems to so many customers. Cigraph sells ArchiCAD since 1984 and with each update of ArchiCAD we experience the same situation: in the first 2-3 moths almost nobody cares about the additional programs, everybody is busy to learn and study the new features of ArchiCAD. Specially important works are rarely done with a new version.

FYI, we did last week a poll in Italy where 1200 users who have AC since more then 3 years answered. We found out that after 3 months only 35% had AC12 installed and almost nobody started an important work with it.

I don’t write this to have an easy excuse, I just wanted to show where our experience is coming from and why we probably didn’t react in the right way. But we learn from mistakes.

At the end your strong critics are actually compliments for us because many of you consider our plug-ins as very important part of their work, maybe even more then we thought. I know by myself (when I’m the user of a software) how frustrating it can be when the needed tools don’t fit together in the moment when I need them. So my apologies are honest, I’m sorry!

I wish everybody good luck for the next future
Istvan Toth, CEO
Cigraph Srl

Gerald wrote:
Excuse me Istvan if somebody has answered this already but nobody has explained what is wrong with the CadImage Add-on registration/security system. It seems quite simple and elegant to me although I am not aware if there are weaknesses to the system.

Since this was already in use by someone who seems quite successful I just wondered why you wouldn't have used this system.

Cheers,

Gerald,
Well, I don’t think I should say something about a product that is used by a serious and very correct competitor.

Lets put it that way: after more then 10 years of developing plug-ins we got to the very difficult decision to invest in this new way to protect our products. Maybe it was a wrong decision, but currently I must say our sales are rising on spite of the general economical crises. Should this tendency stay longer, then indeed we can invest in even more interesting products.
Istvan
l

gpowless wrote:
Certainly I wouldn't depend on current sales to predict future sales. Most people, including myself HAD to buy the upgrades just to keep existing projects going and being able to use the new functionality of AC12. After this I have no longer been using Archistair on new projects since it is clunky and outdated compared to Stairbuilder. I will look at Archistair 2 to see if Cigraph has caught up with the competition. However, if it is nothing more than gloried security update it will never be on my list again.

I do appreciate that you have taken the time to get engaged in this discussion. If you really want to make products for our use that we will support, I would suggest that you listen to us more frequently. Letting your programmers dictate what can and cannot be included is counter productive. We want cutting edge tools to make our work easier and faster. When each yearly upgrade just allows us to use what we have already paid for it doesn't come out as being very progressive.

Good luck on your future. And please stay engaged with the users! (Who by the way are far more important than the shareholders)

Thank you for your kind words. And the problem is that I do agree with you here totally.

Years ago when the updates of AC came only every 18-24 months (and we had only 4-5 plug-ins) we could and did give the Compatibility updates for free. But with the current 12 month cycle we can neither add new feature nor make it for free. I learned now that from a user standpoint it seems a kind of “cheating” as you are forced to pay for something which apparently is OLD. In reality it is not so simple to develop and specially test rewritten or also sometimes only recompiled plug-ins together with a new AchiCAD which is still in alfa or beta version. You get many unexpected bugs and waste hours/days to find out if the fault is in the alpha ArchiCAD or in the plug-in. This is totally underestimated as problem and work (costs), which has to be done by us. I think most of the customers want first possibly bug-free sw and only as second cutting edge technology.

Then don’t forget, maybe it is not important for many of you, but we have many customers who have all kind of different AC versions in their office and we must therefore code the plug-ins in a way that they are working down till ArchiCAD version 7. Which means if for a newer ArchiCAD version we had to adapt the code to a new data-structure very often we have to change things also in the older plug-ins, or at least test them.

But again, you are right: customers have the right not to deal with this. This is our problem and we have to find a way to make things acceptable without many explanations.

I thank you all for the energy you put in this discussion, we learned a lot in Cigraph.
Have all a wonderful day
Istvan