From the blogsphere comes rumblings of possible troubles at ESRI. I’m not clear what losing miltary contracts has to do with cancelling books, unless this was a loss making effort or seen as a way to advertise ArcGIS, etc.
Still, it could be a sign that all is not well at Redlands.
With the release of Manifold 8, you might wonder about the death of Manifold. If the Manifold forum is the central meeting point for the Manifold community, why is the forum so slow on a day to day basis? I like the product, but I wonder what percentage of the market share they really do own. My guess is < 5%. If that much. The new site and help manual are an improvement. Now if we could get another figure head to tone it down about 10 notches, I can get a few customers more interested in using the product.
Hey I called this The Death Series, I don’t rule out any product being included.
‘why is the forum so slow on a day to day basis?’
What do you mean slow? Are you talking about traffic, numbers through the door, seems busy enough to me with a lot of new faces.
As for take up of the software – your guess is as good as mine, but I’d expect whatever it’s at, it’s on an upward trajectory.
There is no way Manifold make up even 1% of the total GIS market. At best, you have a few people playing with it here and there within their other GIS tools available to them.
Are there any local, state or federal Gov’t agencies that have standardized on Manifold? I don’t think so – they are being used on the fringes…
I agree Tyler. Very few in my GIS circle use the product. What do we really know about Manifold? Other than Dimitri and his arrogance, I think it will be hard for major players to invest in the technology with a company shrouded in such secrecy.
I can’t argue with either of you, because all I have to go on is my experience with fellow users and clients, I doubt you have much other evidence to go on either.
I can say that such a well designed and feature rich GIS as Manifold can’t be ignored by the legacy GIS market for too long, if it indeed isn’t being taken up as much as I think.
I’ve always found the whole legacy term a bit strange. Hech, I don’t want to come across as an ESRI apologist, they have issues. I guess I don’t really look at ESRI products as Legacy any more than Windows is legacy. If Manifold is really cutting edge, why would they pick such a Legacy platform? Oh well.
What would be the best term to use for the way Manifold handles support, sales, and licensing? Barbaric?
I think we need to start a save Chris from Manifold Blog.
‘What would be the best term to use for the way Manifold handles support, sales, and licensing?’
Cheaper and than ESRI.
Cheaper indeed! I guess the higher price point provides a sales and support department that treats you with courtesy and respect. I get the feeling that Manifold zealots enjoy getting slapped around a bit by the vendor.
I wonder how many Manifold customers or more importantly potential customers would be willing to pay a higher fee for better customer service options? Look at the extensive developer network provided by the “legacy” ESRI compared to Manifold. Can you point me to the Manifold page that contains developer samples written in C++, VB.NET, C#, etc. ESRI EDN is a terrific resource for the developer, albeit at a much higher price point. Then again, support is one of the weaknesses of Manifold.
What are you on about? I’ve heard very many good things about paid Manifold Tech support from fellow users, where’s the evidence of poor support?
If you’re talking about free support, there’s plenty of examples on GeoReference.
Other great resources:
Manifold’s Free Stuff page containing source code for a variety of languages:
http://www.manifold.net/products/freestuff.html
Manipedia:
SQL and Scripting:
http://www.manipedia.eu/Main_Page
“support is one of the weaknesses of Manifold.”
I’m surprised to hear that. Are you talking about a specific experience using a technical service product from Manifold? I would be astonished to learn that you purchased a tech support product from Manifold and were not happy with it – I’d be curious to hear the details about that situation so tech support could improve.
Let me be clear about that question for those folks who may be reading this thread but who are unfamiliar with Manifold product offerings:
Manifold sells tech support service products for a fee. Standard and developer tech support service products providing support by email are available at a low price. Telephone tech support service products for standard tech support are also available, for a very much higher price. Although most Manifold licenses are bundled with two prepaid standard incidents for tech support by email, a Manifold license does not otherwise include any other prepaid tech support.
The service for a fee basis of tech support for Manifold products is disclosed in unmistakeably prominent notices on the web site. For example, in the entry page to the Online Store at
http://www.manifold.net/admin/store.shtml
There is a prominent, three font sizes larger and bold-faced green color headline “Tech Support by Email” with the paragraph
“Manifold provides technical support by email, charging a small fee for each incident of technical support. See the Support page for details, including information on using the two free support incidents provided to Manifold System licensees.”
…apologies to people already familiar with the above for this preamble, but I think it important that folks not familiar with Manifold product offerings understand what the deal is and that it is a very prominent, unmistakeable deal that folks voluntarily undertake.
OK… on with the post…
Manifold does a lot of polling of people who have purchased tech support service products to see how they liked the service. Over 95% say they liked it, with developer support product buyers at times approaching 99% approval. That’s exceptionally high customer approval so anytime someone says they don’t like Manifold technical support I become intensely curious to hear details of their experience.
I am especially curious to hear details because it is so difficult to find that 1 to 5% who thought the tech support experience should be improved. When most of your customers really like the product it becomes harder and harder to find out how it can be improved.
That’s especially difficult in the case of a service product like tech support which is often criticized by people who have never used it, and of course if you are trying to improve a product you need to focus on the comments of those people who have actually used it.
I can understand and accept that some folks don’t like it that tech support with Manifold is a paid service product. Some people think it should be free, unlimited tech support and they don’t like having to pay a fee, not even a small fee to get technical support services.
I fully agree with someone’s right to have the opinion that they prefer software products which come bundled with “free” technical support services. No problem with that at all. But that’s not how Manifold is licensed.
I even agree that someone who licensed Manifold with full awareness that tech support required a fee might later change their minds or might have forgotten that’s what the deal was, or perhaps someone else at their organization licensed the product and did not convey the need to purchase tech support service products to the ultimate user. Those sorts of things happen as well.
So if someone writes “oh, I just hate that Manifold tech support” it is sometimes the case that what they really are saying is “Oh, I just hate that Manifold tech support is not free,” and what they are *not* saying is “Oh, I bought a support incident and I didn’t like the response.”
If your posting here is the former, I think it would be more productive if you would refine your comments to make it clear that it is having to pay for tech support is what you don’t like.
If your posting is the latter, I am especially interested in hearing the details of your experience as it is one of those very rare cases, very hard to find, where someone actually used a support product and was unhappy about it.
If you don’t mind, it would be great if you could post somewhere the actual thread of your exchange with tech support. Just copy and paste it the way it happened.
If they did not apply the token you used, just trim off a few of the characters from the token in your posting so that you’ll still be able to use it in the future. No worries about privacy with tech support, because they are always eager to learn the specifics when someone has been disappointed, so they can do a better job in the future.
Regards to all,
JustPassin – two calls for evidence to back up your claim – if there’s none coming that will speak volumes.
I should also add that I’ve never used a Manifold Tech support token, you get two free when you buy/upgrade, which is a sure sign IMO that the free support out there along with the best resource – the Help file – probably cover 95% of users needs.
That might change when I get more into scripting in the near future!
I’m not talking about any specific tech support incident. I’m talking about the overall support services offered by Manifold. Go back and read my post Chris. I never said that I had a problem with the support staff. I was talking about documentation and developer samples. These are support related items and when you compare these items to EDN, you will notice a big difference.
‘I guess the higher price point provides a sales and support department that treats you with courtesy and respect.’
Well the above to me sounds like criticism of Manifold Tech Support to me.
JustPassin brings up some good points:
1. Manifold isn’t seen throughout the industry, or even on the fringes. Take a look at the Military, Government, Private business, etc. They are all using ESRI. In fact, if you walk around town with an ESRI shirt on at the mall or a State fair, you are guaranteed to have someone come up to you and say “hey, cool, you work with GIS”. If you wore a Manifold shirt, you wouldn’t meet someone in 5 years who would know what it is.
2. There aren’t tons of support sites out there to assist users. ArcScripts probably has over 1,000 scripts that you can download for free. ESRI provides dozens of templates for IMS. If you are stuck, and in need of Manifold support, you only have one place to go – the Manifold forum. If you want to learn Manifold, there is just one place to go – the Manifold help pages. There aren’t any books you can buy on Manifold. Imagine if the only place where you could learn ArcGIS was from the help manual. You can’t walk 5 miles without bumping into a certified ESRI training center.
‘In fact, if you walk around town with an ESRI shirt on at the mall or a State fair, you are guaranteed to have someone come up to you and say “hey, cool, you work with GIS”.’
Which town is this – Redlands?
My experience is most people haven’t a clue what GIS is whether it’s ESRI or not.
On 2 – thanks for reminding me I forgot to mention another valuable resource – the GISAdvisor training courses, which also includes an IMS template that many Manifold IMS sites are based on.
Of course there’s much more resources out there for ESRI, I’m not arguing that fact – I’m more concerned with the unfair criticism of Manifold Technical support, which JustPassin is now backtracking on.
This is a hoot… can’t resist, so I’ll bite…
“If you wore a Manifold shirt, you wouldn’t meet someone in 5 years who would know what it is.”
That depends where you wore it. If you wore it to a mainstream setting such as Microsoft, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA or Google or to any of the mainstream computer gatherings or venture capital industry gatherings you’d run into plenty of people who’d know what it was about. If you wore an ESRI shirt in such settings, you’d probably also meet a few people who knew what it was but the reaction would be different.
With the Manifold shirt people would assume you knew what things like Katmai and CUDA were and would discuss the latest, rocket-hot topics. With the ESRI shirt people would speak to you more slowly and try to use simpler words to not confuse you.
At the venture capitalist gatherings if you wear a Manifold shirt the VC’s will pitch you on why you should take their money. Wear the ESRI shirt and they will politely ask you to step aside so you don’t block their path to the sushi bar buffet.
I give the VC example because financing is just as an important part of a development business as is choice of core technology.
Successful developers quickly realize that a business model based upon living-fossil technology like ESRI’s is not the best way to show a venture capitalist you have the savvy to deserve their funding.
“ArcScripts probably has over 1,000 scripts that you can download for free.”
This is not a plus in two ways: First, sites only accumulate 1000 scripts if the underlying technology is more or less static. Rapidly evolving, rapidly improving technology like Manifold changes too fast for large libraries of old things to accumulate. Rapid improvement has its downside as well, of course, as developers need to rev their scripts forward to keep up. But most would take on that burden happily for the genuinely significant improvements something like new Manifold releases provide.
The second issue is that quite a few of those scripts are required to deal with primitivisms and other holes in Arc. It’s like someone who is proud that he has a weak automobile engine but there are lots of retrofits to help it work better. Better to buy a superior engine in the first place.
“If you are stuck, and in need of Manifold support, you only have one place to go – the Manifold forum.”
I’m surprised to see that in a thread that discusses the technical support service products offered by Manifold. In reality, if you are stuck and in need of Manifold support and you don’t want to use the forum, you throw a coin in the slot and get immediate, expert developer support direct from the Manifold factory.
I should note, by the way, that the folks who staff the developer support team at Manifold are rotated into support roles from the development organization. They are actually engineers who have created the product. We feel there are many benefits to doing that:
First, time spent in support gives engineers direct experience with real-world customer needs. They later apply that in the continued development of the product. I assure everyone that after serving in a support role engineers become acutely sensitized to how customers work with the product. When they make choices later on as to how a new feature operates or a new dialog is laid out, they do so with an eye to the possibility that at some time in the future they themselves might be called upon to support it.
Second, this gives tech support the best possible product knowledge. Developers communicating with tech support often remark upon the unusually high level of expertise that is evident. That’s because the Manifold person on the other side of the exchange has helped create the product so they really know all the ins and outs of it.
Third, this provides extremely rapid resolution of problems. If an engineer doesn’t know that particular part of Manifold, he or she knows which group does.
Finally, it provides rapid evolution of the product to meet customer requirements. Engineers working in support are well placed to take back what they hear directly into the development organization to make small tweaks or other adjustments (a new feature) in the very next update.
“There aren’t any books you can buy on Manifold.”
Sure there are! You just don’t recognize them as such. A large part of Manifold is the use of standard Microsoft facilities so the books one reads about those standard Microsoft facilities are the zillions of books published to assist mainstream users. This is true for everything from regular expressions and XML to scripting in ActiveX or .NET languages or doing development using Visual Studio.
In point of fact, there is not *that* much specific to Manifold that would require more than the thousands of pages in the user manual, at least compared to the very large corpus of mainstream stuff incorporated into Manifold.
That’s also the case with the various other standards used by Manifold. A good example is spatial DBMS: because Manifold does not use some goof-ball proprietary monstrosity like ArcSDE there is no need for Manifold to document that. Instead, you can connect direct and natively to Oracle Spatial or other spatial DBMS and take direct advantage of all the educational resources available for Oracle.
There’s not much commendable in the notion that ESRI created a variety of highly unique, proprietary notions (ranging from private languages like Avenue to private data objects like SDE) and then found itself having to create a private industry to document them. ESRI has gotten better at using mainstream notions (scripting being a good example) but it still can’t resist trying to proprietarize everything. So sure, as long as ESRI keeps that up they will have to have more ESRI-specific books than Manifold needs.
Regards to all!
Chris I need to start my own blog, but
http://www.cartotalk.com/index.php?showtopic=2457&hl=
http://www.osgeo.org/journal/volume2
(check out the LizardTech ref!)
here’s a couple I noticed today.
This one I need to figure out:
http://bullsworld2007.wordpress.com/2007/09/19/ge-users-vs-nww-users/
IE vs FF *users*?
“blaim”???