You know...in the real-world environment where a customer is held less captive to his product than in this case (we are tied to Mentor unless we want to expend a whole lot of effort and cost - which is starting to look very appealing by the way) there would be serious issues in the way this has been dealt with.
I have little doubt Mentor has been working hard to fix the problem. I have no doubt there were (or will be) lots of meetings to figure out how this got missed. I have no doubt processes and controls, checks and balances will all be adjusted, changed, added to, etc. to ensure something like this doesn't happen again.
What has been left out in all of this is the customer...you know, the guy actually footing the bill for all this...
PADs is a spendy piece of software - pretty good in my opinion - and a faulty piece of software was produced. "We're going to fix it" is the response...well, I certainly hope so. In the meantime, the original download is still available with no warning that there might be an issue (that I'm aware of). Aside from assurances that "all available resources" are being thrown at it and that it will be a few days, there has been zero update information. Where is customer service here? We don't have the full suite so we are chopped liver?
Even the basic user pays large sums of money annually for support (read: customer service) and I would have expected a bit more communication on the part of Mentor Graphics.
Rolling the PADs version back a rev is time consuming on roughly 8-10 computers...my IT guy doesn't just sit around waiting for me to give him things to do. We've held off on migrating some of the machines backward but I can't wait any longer. If I knew the release was around the corner (literally not just imaginatively) I would wait a bit more, but I can't do that.
I guess the point of this rant is this: Mentor, you've done a poor job of communicating with your customer base. To say I'm frustrated and dissappointed is an understatement. To handle the situation in the vacuous (sp?) manner you have could not do a better job of telling your low-end user customers that, "you're not that important...just wait longer". Customer service is what keeps a customer your customer, even when things like this happen. This is a fine example of helping your customers make the decision to look around at alternatives a bit more seriously.
Having said that...could we possibly...just possibly, get some kind of realistic, "here's how it going" or "we expect to release an update on x-day"?
PS. I would never get away with this with my customers. We've had issues with our product and have always sought to fix the issue while at the same time giving the customer real projected end dates. While in the fix process we are constantly in communication with them. Our customers remain happy with us and are please with our customer service. Just an FYI.
BREAKING NEWS
*******I see in the last few minutes Version 9.4 has finally been removed from the download page.**********
