"A product's sales can be affected by additional aspects other than technical excellence."
Doing a deep dive to select a 3D printer, I'd honed in on one, but their user forum was full of bitter complaints of no response from customer support (non-forum contacts via email and phone), including months of no response to initial purchase delivery. Holey moley! Yes, it's not just about the technical aspects of the product. Ended up with a printer that got glowing customer support reviews, and found yes indeed, they are excellent. Current pursuit, a slicer, with excellent customer support.
3D developments have the most bizarre user expectations, as expressed in this thread, which look to be from open source development. Open source development gets no pay so the only payoff for many is personal recognition, a one man show including their user forum. Commercial development instead is for a company, gets a paycheck and the product is usually defined by many (engineering, marketing and some user feedback) and developed by many. Development is usually toiling away under a mountain of work with challenging deadlines and don't usually have any time to cruise user forums.
Re: Software development status ?
S3D has new releases roughly every 6 months, often with new features and not just bug fixes. I've heard reports of their customer support via email being good, but I've never had reason to use it myself. I usually either solve my own problems or just rely on others in this (and other) forums.
In general I think commercial support for software is going away - who do you call if you have problems with Microsoft Word? Or Firefox, or Chrome?
At least Apple makes it easy to find their paid support options, and you can always go into an Apple store for free support if you're willing to wait a while.
When buying a printer I went with Printrbot not only because of cost, but because they have a robust customer forum (actually two) and because they sell parts for their own machines. I want to be able to replace broken parts and fix things myself, and I couldn't do that with a lot of the printers out there. I recently bought a Wanhao Duplicator i3 (for $375). It arrived broken and so far the company is not responding to my emails at all. Oh well. I kind of half expected that. I'm just going to disassemble it and use it for parts as I build my own printer now.
In general I think commercial support for software is going away - who do you call if you have problems with Microsoft Word? Or Firefox, or Chrome?
At least Apple makes it easy to find their paid support options, and you can always go into an Apple store for free support if you're willing to wait a while.
When buying a printer I went with Printrbot not only because of cost, but because they have a robust customer forum (actually two) and because they sell parts for their own machines. I want to be able to replace broken parts and fix things myself, and I couldn't do that with a lot of the printers out there. I recently bought a Wanhao Duplicator i3 (for $375). It arrived broken and so far the company is not responding to my emails at all. Oh well. I kind of half expected that. I'm just going to disassemble it and use it for parts as I build my own printer now.
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KeyboardWarrior
- Posts: 480
- Joined: Thu Jun 19, 2014 5:02 pm
Re: Software development status ?
Version 3.0.0 came out about a month ago, and 3.0.1 about two weeks ago.
https://www.simplify3d.com/software/changelog/
The software is very much being actively developed, look at how massive the change log is for 3.0.0
https://www.simplify3d.com/software/changelog/
The software is very much being actively developed, look at how massive the change log is for 3.0.0
