I'm sure an update is in the works. For the first time since I've started using Sonic Foundry products, their support seems completely slammed. I've reported two issues, one of which they evenutally (read: a month later) wrote me back and said "due to the release of Vegas, SF8, yada, yada, yada...we're still unable to get to your request, etc., etc., so please call support directly for free."

All software companies walk a fine line between making money and keeping users happy. If they waited for a completely bug-free product, software would never be released and they'd never make money. Release too early and it's full of bugs, and you anger your user base. Vegas has been pretty stable for me since 6.0b, but based on that message I got from support basically stating that their totally overwhelmed with issues, me thinks they released too early.

So in answer to kentwolf's last statement, if they made enough revenue with the inital releases of Vegas, then yes, they probably consider it acceptable. I'm certainly not trying to speak on behalf of Sony, just stating the hard facts of life in the software biz.

>>...just stating the hard facts of life in the software biz.

Oh, I *do* underastand.

I understand not spending a gazillion dollars fixing an issue that affects maybe less than 1% of folks. The issues stated, however, are repeatable by 100%.

Thanks for for the comment though.

Simple way to avoid the problem ticker overload. Keep an accessible list of known bugs online.
A simple bug in a release could theoretically generate one request per user and that'd overload any company. If users are able to find out that the bug is known and what its status is then they know there's no point in reporting it again. Very simple process to implement and before anyone says "no other software companies do this" all I can say is checkout Avid and Microsoft, Avid even manage to list every camera and VCR and known issues with their software, heck they even go beyond that and list issues with decks that have nothing to do with their code.
To the dinasours in marketing: Not having such info freely available no longer creates the illusion that your product is bug free, potential clients are way more savvy these days and the inference they draw is that your product is so buggy that you're too ashamed of it to tell the world the truth, i.e. buy from someone else.
Bob.

Bob, you're making the mistake of assuming that people will actually read this information. Don't get me wrong, I agree such a list would be helpful and would likely cut down on some of the support calls/emails, but in these forums we routinely see people that can't be bothered to read the manual long enough to figure out what the software *CAN* do - why would these people read information on what it can't?

Sony created their own support problems by pushing V6 out the door when it clearly wasn't ready and needed at least one or 2 months more shakedown.

Up until about 4 months ago, I used to do engineering software maintenance on some complex stuff and I know all too well what happens when a new release is pushed out of the nest before sufficient testing has taken place. I used to hate it when our product manager gave me an arbitrary early deadline for delivering a new release that wasn't based on any of the projections we'd previously discussed about when we'd actually have the release stable enough to unleash into the wild.

--Scott

Sounds like we both come from the same background, look I agree, it's hard to even get users to RTFM but at least when you do start to go into overload with incident reports you can send an automated email that says why you're taking so long and please check here to see if we don't already know about the issue.
When something goes wrong and it always will you're hit with a double whammy, you tie up resources dealing with the screaming users that should be used fixing the problem. I remember only too well being paged a dozen times just to be told out network was down whilst I was trying to fix the thing. Simple solution ,announcement over the P.A., when we got a better PABX my extension went to AVR with a message saying which problem I knew about and was working on, if and only if you've got a new one press 2 to call my mobile.
Bob.

I think a good solution for the future releases of Vegas 7 and such would be to bring in more beta testers to try even harder to bring out these problems in advance.

It's a two-edged sword. If Sony operates anything like other companies, Beta testers are usually supported directly by the engineering folks developing the software - adding more beta testers (especially without discretion) adds to their workload, sometimes significantly to the point where all of the development engineering effort ends up being focused on the beta and not on further developing and/or fixing found/known issues.

The bottom line is that extensive beta testing costs money to the development engineering group. Releasing a buggy version of the software does not usually impact the revenue stream for the development group because they aren't paying for, or are measured by bugs after ship (at least that's been my experience).

--Scott

ahhh yes RTFM, that's a hard one - no-one wants to do it. It's too time consuming too even look in the help file search. We've all been guilty of this a time or two, I'm sure. But come on every one...
Read
The
Fun / Full / Free / Funky
Manual

Have a good one all.

Dave