fractalnavel

well, only sorta new - but the effects of intel's $20M infusion of capital to telligent late last summer have been slowly becoming evident over recent months.

never mind the immediate spate of top-heavy hiring done last fall, and the subsequent layoffs (no, a connection? ya think?), and the explosion of market-speak bloggers there.  it's what's been happening on communityserver.com and the forums there that's been interesting:

• the price lists went missing.  instead, it's "call us for a price".  that always smells fishy to me.  unfair prices adjustments ?  forced relationships with the sales department ?  look, folks, people just want to have something they can plan & compare with.
• there are a number of features being removed from the 2009 version, and others being locked into the top-tiered pricing.  as in, how can i, as a developer or IT manager, evaluate locked down features ?
• speaking of the 2009 version, the last few years' major version releases have occurred in mid april.  this time around, it's vaguely in the 3rd quarter.  maybe.  no one really says any more when asked.
• and the future product/feature roadmap has gone missing as well.
• the last SP release was missing the SDK for a few weeks.  as in, there seems to be a threat to the shared source promise that was made when they founded their company on open source software.
• the number of bugs seems to be up & multiplying - and often not being recognized, or fixed.  and there is too frequent regression.
• sometimes downloadable versions are replaced with new builds, but without any notice.
• and finally, just the nature of the forums themselves have changed - although that's not entirely under telligent's direct control - huge amount of traffic, lots of people not looking at prior posts, asking things over & over, other "duh" type questions.  yeah, that's their new customer base, and they're going to have to adjust to it - clearly, the current product is not a good match.  ouch.

just a few observations there, various colored flags.  you can dig up the relevant forum posts yourself if you want.  jon wrote a bit about the graffiti troubles last week.

this is all very sad, but not unexpected.  i was hoping for a few more good years out of them before this sort of shit started.  now, it's going to be significantly harder to convince customers of the value of using their products.  used to be a no-brainer.  and honestly, at this point, i'm not even sure what i'd be convincing them of - no one knows, and telligent's not telling.

i was about to add that at least the third-party developer community is alive & well, but that's not really the case.  most add-ons developed for CS2.1 and 2007 have not been explicitly updated for CS2008 or 2008.5.  the motivation seems to have dropped off.  luckily, many of these still work as is, or with minor mods, but still, this is another flag.  and new add-ons ?  i really haven't seen any.  just the occasional patch for broken out-of-box features, but that's hardly the same thing.

it may turn out that CS2008.5 was the high water mark for this product.

shit.

of course, this may all be coincidental, and perhaps intel's involvement stemmed an even worse sequence of events.  maybe things are on the upswing.  only time will tell.

update 2009.05.04:

late update, yeah, one important additional item kept slipping my mind: there have been significant changes to the licensing terms, to which any new downloaders must agree prior to downloading (as in updates, sdk's, etc.).  Now, there have been verbal assurances on the forums that the issues will be taken care of, but hey, that's not in the contract, what do they think we are ?

what's changed ?  for one thing, a new requirement for annually renewing one's license purchase (full price ?!), with the added requirement that if you don't, you must stop using the software.  WTF ?!  that's brand new.  the original license only needed to be purchased once, with a much cheaper optional annual software assurance / maintenace / support / whatever purchase that granted rights to free upgrades.  and in any case, once purchased, you cold run the software indefinitely.

there are supposed to be grandfathering provisions for old license terms, but they have yet to include those provisions in the new license.

load of crap. when exactly was this thing taken commercial again ?  less than five years ago ?  promises promises.  the little guy is about to be given the boot.