Digital BW, The Print

Julian-

I wasn't taking a shot at you. Actually, I agree with you completely. 
This is a very valid criticism of Cone. 2 years ago, there might have 
been some validity to him wanting to keep his system "pure" since it 
was undergoing so much development and the alternatives were very 
much unproven. To maintain this position today is closing his eyes to 
reality. To try to "manage the market" has been a big mistake for any 
company that tried. In a field this large, a closed architecture 
attitude will eventually cause the company great harm. Look at the 
success of the Palm Pilot against the mighty Microsoft; I believe 
that the biggest factor here was the developer community was courted 
by Palm... And Cone may be making the same mistake by not courting 
the likes of Paul and John who are delivering some pretty incredible 
tools to us (not to mention they are giving away the help and the 
inks they write for are half the price of Cone ink...though this is 
not about price).

Anyhow, you make a good point on forcing customers to buy the ink 
with the software. I believe that should be the customer choice and 
that most people should and would at least try the Cone ink, so what 
would be lost by the good will of allowing customer choice?

Tom O'Connell

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "Julian Thomas" 
<julianthomas@t...> wrote:
> >
> > Any time I have phoned them, I've gotten smart friendly helpful
> > service. There is a lot of criticism in the forums comparing Jon 
to
> > Gates... Whatever... They've been great to me.
> >
> Err, that  came from me. I'm not comparing JC to BG. Jon was very 
helpful to
> me when I had the greenies - where the comparison comes in is the 
marketing
> of the product - as in you buy everything or nothing, a complete 
kit of OS,
> email, IE, media player, cis, inks, driver etc etc. Some say that 
that is to
> provide support, but that is the same argument BG usedin his recent 
US court
> cases. My comments are not personal at all, I've found tech 
support, sales,
> BB, JC to be more than helpful - but they won't split their 
software from
> their inks.
> 
> Julian