Weird. I have just 8 Megs in my Notebook and I've had my PCMCIA drivers,
SCSI drivers, ZIP drivers, MS-Works, Trumpet, Netscape and other things
running and have never had a complaint when running PMWin - 486-75.
Now that I think about it, I can't remember any major problems running
anything on that machine except for NS bugs.
>What do people do with their old PM 11's? Do YOU ever get any back?
Yep. Most all of them were returned a junked a long time ago. When the
PM-2 came out we swapped a lot of them. Even today whenever a PM-11
surfaces the first thing we do is encourage a trade. We want them out of
the field and out of our hair. There are so ridiculously few of them
left that supporting them has no value.
>1. There are MANY out there still. I have many and have sold many.
Not really. And *definitely* not compared to ANY other unit we sell.
Off the top of my head you are the only PM-11 booster I have heard of.
>2. They still work pretty well and are good for backups and shell
>services.
Yeah, they still run and work ok. Just dead end technology.
>4. They are only 4 years out of active sales according to the dates I
>see on some of the latest ones.
Something like that I guess. But our sales have been growing on a steep
curve, so comparatively they are barely a glitch on the graph of units
out there.
>I should think that the fact that an old product that your
>company makes still being in demand makes it something worth supporting if
>only to gain further sales.
Return on investment. You know that we've about doubled in staff in the
last year? Half of the people here sort of vaguely remember we once
made something called a PM-11... Let alone the IR-4.
Hell, I was baffled the first time I got a question on one a little over
a year ago. They are very rare beasts. Which is why we encourage trading
them in, so that we can't finally be done with them. In a perfect world
we could support them forever. But when you are trying to just keep
everyone one trained on the new features (we have a weekly class for the
support folks just to cover all the new stuff out and coming out) it
doesn't seem wise to train people to deal with the old ones. And when you
have people clammoring for new things, should we divert engineering to
make things work for the PM-11?
Like PMconsole. People want a new version that is more up to date. They
want bugs fixed. They want new features.
Are those things more important that making it work with a unit most people
have never heard of and fewer actively use? I think so. So would most
customers. I think they would be ripshit if they founf out we had an
engineer making it work on the PM-11 when he could have been working on new
features.
>Final note: If you need me to supply you with a PM 11, I can. Also, I
We have them. There is a stack of them sitting up on the top shelf out
back getting dusty. I think the rest were scrapped. We just don't bother
to keep any running here, no use for them.
-MZ
-- Livingston Enterprises - Chair, Department of Interstitial Affairs Phone: 800-458-9966 510-426-0770 FAX: 510-426-8951 megazone@livingston.com For support requests: support@livingston.com <http://www.livingston.com/> Snail mail: 6920 Koll Center Parkway #220, Pleasanton, CA 94566 See me in person: Internet Expo, Boston, MA, October 16-17, Booth 422 ;-)