Dear Erik,
> I know you e-smith developers peek into this anthill of
> messages with great interest...
Yes, that is true
Actually we keep close tabs on this bulletin board to find out what people are looking for in our products and services and to learn how we can do a better job.
> As a plain and Linux-ignorant but DOS/Windows-knowledgable
> e-smith user (I know, I see your smiles and hear your giggles
> all the way over the atlantic :´-() I feel I can´t refrain
> from expressing my thoughts.
Good! You are exactly the kind of customer we are trying to reach, and we would like to know your thoughts.
> I love e-smith, that´s not the problem.
Also good
> What I don´t like is when it ships with new "features"
> without a word from the author... No, go away, ugly thought
> - they couldn´t be the "problems" fixed by the contact
> provided by the $595 annual subscription fee??
No, we are not that cynical
> But, as by logic of a politician, my next i-bay could only be
> 12 letters long.
We've done extensive testing and found that some Windows machines cannot access shares with names longer than 13 characters. So if you create a 14-character i-bay name and try to access it from one of these brain-damaged Windows machines, you get "share not found" error messages from Windows - and of course it looks like e-smith is broken. So that's why we decided to implement the restriction. What would you recommend? We are open to changing this behavior in the next version. Normally our reasoning is that we normally prefer to impose limitations in order to eliminate a possible type of weird failure.
> Now, what would come next? Would my old i-bays be
> automatically erased at midnight, to protect me from the
> dangers of long i-bays names?
I don't know... that seems kind of drastic
But we're thinking of automatically deleting i-bays that haven't been accessed for over one month. *Just Kidding*
> I feel e-smith might be the bridge between user simplicity
> and Linux reliability and low pricing. Please, don´t offer
> too many functions before you loose grip and can handle
> them with simplicity! You´re in no hurry - no Linux software
> I know of comes close to the user friendlyness - you can
> afford an extra few months of thourough testing before
> releases.
Please explain more. Do you have any bugs to report with 4.0?
And as for the months of testing, you may not be aware of our history. We were a husband and wife team working from our home until March 5, 2000. We closed our first round of financing in April and in the last three months have hired 18 staff, moved into office space, replaced our P-90 server running on a residential ADSL connection - with a rack of VA Linux servers running on high-speed Internet connections. We're serving hundreds of Gb of e-smith downloads (at significant cost) to give away our software for free - whereas we were serving a tiny fraction of that only a couple of months ago. I think we've done pretty well considering the changes we've been dealing with!
Now that we've stabilized, I think you'll see a more orderly release process for future e-smith versions though. You are right that we can always do things better.
> It might be better to have $55 annual subscriptions by
> 100000 users answering simple questions than 10000 at
> $595 solving elaborate problems at root#.
With our new pricing, we're trying to clarify what our business is. We're still going to continue giving away our software for
free via our FTP site. However, our primary product is a complete solution for small business comparable to Microsoft Small Business Server - including media, support, and upgrades. We are tentatively discontinuing the media package to eliminate the confusion that it has been causing.
Still, as a small company that is growing, we are listening to what you say and will take it into consideration.
Thanks for listening, and please stay in touch!
- Joseph Morrison, CEO
e-smith, inc.
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