Wayne, 

I think the best thing any company can do is listen to their customers.  A 
company that focuses heavily on customers will have a side effect of having a 
quality product and reputation and will thus gain in popularity increasing the 
bottom line until Microsoft or Cisco buys them. ;-)  

But I think MS set a precedent of release first and patch later and it worked 
so now a lot of companies are moving to that model.  Get's quick cash up front 
so they can put more money into development of fixes/patches/upgrades without 
impacting the bottom line as much.  I think that is really unnecessary for 
corporations as big as MS, Symantec, McAfee, etc etc.  But the model works 
because the quick profit makes a warm fuzzy for the investors who really don't 
care what the company puts out as long as it is profitable.  In a way, this is 
what the "dot com bust" was all about.  I think the days of customer driven 
companies is all but gone in the arena of big name software manufacturing.  
(Small companies do this, get a good profit margin etc, then get bought by huge 
companies.)

Phil Koster
Network Administrator
City of Grand Rapids
Direct: 616-456-3136
Helpdesk: 456-3999


-----Original Message-----
From: Wayne T Smith [mailto:wts at maine.edu] 

With articles such as this, perhaps Symantec marketing will realize they need a 
new feature that dramatically decreases the operational cost of NetBackup.  
Design for high quality and ease of debugging problems would considerably 
lessen my inclination to look elsewhere.  What's yours?

cheers, wayne