Farewell Neo-philes.

kklare · Posted: Wed May 11, 2011 1:50 pm Post subject: Farewell Neo-philes.

I hope I have contributed to the debugging of NeoOffice and thus contributed more than the small amount I gave a year ago to get heard on some problems.

As a retiree, however, I do not feel I can contribute $100 yearly (about the cost of the dreaded MS programs, each year) to keep my voice heard and I hope I don't need to be heard. The program seems to be on a good footing due to Patrick and the few regulars. I have enjoyed seeing its development.

Best of luck,
-Ken

P.S. other programs that I have found as good as commercial and use daily are:
(1) calibre for e-book database--updated more than weekly, and
(2) See Finance for a Quicken replacement without the expense.
My video database is a Calc sheet, for which I thank you.
This postscript is just in case you have not found these other programs.
-K

ovvldc · Posted: Thu May 12, 2011 6:52 am Post subject:

Hey Ken,

You certainly did and I am sorry to see you go.

best wishes,
Oscar

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

Ken,

Thank you again for your patience with all of the debugging that was needed to fix those nasty bugs you found. Although they were very difficult bugs to debug and fix, it was worth the effort as fixing them has made NeoOffice much more stable for everyone.

I wish that we did not have to set the support cost so high, but sadly we have to in order for Ed and I from being overwhelmed. Fortunately, over the last year the bugs posted by our large donors have been uncommon bugs that, while severe for those who experience the bug, only affect a small number of users.

This makes us confident that the high support cost is doing what it was intended to do: ensure that the most critical bugs are not lost in a deluge of more mundane questions. Although we wish we had the funding to staff support for all users, that is sadly not likely to happen but I feel that we have setup a support process that does the most good for all users given the resources that we have available.

One recommendation that I can give when you experience a bug that no other large donors have reported is to wait until the next Beta release. In general, we temporarily lower the cost to post to $25 while a Beta version is available to encourage more reporting of bugs during that time. Basically, Ed and I rearrange our work schedules to spend a lot more time on support while a Beta version is available so we can handle the temporarily increase in support load during that time.

Patrick