Well now, let’s see… August, September, October, November, December. That’s five whole months that have gone by since Matrox first announced the soon to be released RT2000! It was soon to be released in August, it was soon to be released in September, etc. Now it’s soon to be released in January…
This is, unfortunately, typical of Matrox. This ‘cart before the horse’ style of marketing is getting a bit tiresome. And then, once the long awaited product finally does hit the shelves, who here among us can claim that they’ve purchased any Matrox NLE products that were bug-free, right out of the gate? I certainly can’t. I mean, it took them TWO YEARS to fully mature the original Rainbow Runner, and by that time the product was discontinued. I can’t personally speak for the RR-G or the Marvel, but reading the same old story over the months in this and other newsgroups has fully dissuaded me from ever buying either of those products. But that was pretty great, finally having a product that worked after all that waiting. I mean, I'm still using that original Mystique220/RR-S package, simply because I know it works. And it works, apparently, because the hardware was completely mature when the product was released, but the software was woefully lacking… It's always the software that has problems.
It leads me to believe that the same corporate paradigms are in force over at the ‘pro’ division, out of which (someday) the RT2000 will come. I mean, the C-Cube technology, around which this ‘coming soon’ product is based, is a fully developed hardware platform. The hardware will come out, and it won’t change through the several iterations of software patches and ‘bug fixes’ and upgrade versions that will follow. To be fair, this isn’t unique to Matrox. There are many companies out there in the aftermarket wake of Microsoft, feeding upon the vast, installed customer base for all sorts of great niche products, NLE among them. They are, for the most part, all run by greedy little feudal lords who, through no real intention on their part, tend to squash creativity in favor of politics, and run the punishments and rewards within their realms, based upon penis size. And programmers get left in the backwash. They are, after all, the bottom of the feudal heirarchy in the modern corporate world.
Canopus, obviously, isn’t like that…
But this is what the chronic LATE DELIVERY from Matrox says to me. It says: here’s a company run by mediocre mental midgets who wouldn’t know a C language function from a page in a grade school primer. People who are constantly ‘saving money’ for their company by short circuiting the profit/reinvestment cycle, in order to fatten up their annual bonuses. 'Oh, you need us to purchase the latest Microsoft SDK's? Gee, that sure is a lot of money... Can't you guys just write your own, and get around that?'
It all comes down to this: all the writing on the wall, and all the past performance indicates that the RT2000 will most likely be late, and not a mature product when it finally does hit the shelves. It means that, most likely, anyone who buys one as soon as it’s finally released will simply be a BETA TESTER who got suckered into paying full retail to be part of the testing program.
I really hope that I’m wrong. But at this stage, after FIVE FREAKIN’ MONTHS, I have to call it like I see it.
This is, unfortunately, typical of Matrox. This ‘cart before the horse’ style of marketing is getting a bit tiresome. And then, once the long awaited product finally does hit the shelves, who here among us can claim that they’ve purchased any Matrox NLE products that were bug-free, right out of the gate? I certainly can’t. I mean, it took them TWO YEARS to fully mature the original Rainbow Runner, and by that time the product was discontinued. I can’t personally speak for the RR-G or the Marvel, but reading the same old story over the months in this and other newsgroups has fully dissuaded me from ever buying either of those products. But that was pretty great, finally having a product that worked after all that waiting. I mean, I'm still using that original Mystique220/RR-S package, simply because I know it works. And it works, apparently, because the hardware was completely mature when the product was released, but the software was woefully lacking… It's always the software that has problems.
It leads me to believe that the same corporate paradigms are in force over at the ‘pro’ division, out of which (someday) the RT2000 will come. I mean, the C-Cube technology, around which this ‘coming soon’ product is based, is a fully developed hardware platform. The hardware will come out, and it won’t change through the several iterations of software patches and ‘bug fixes’ and upgrade versions that will follow. To be fair, this isn’t unique to Matrox. There are many companies out there in the aftermarket wake of Microsoft, feeding upon the vast, installed customer base for all sorts of great niche products, NLE among them. They are, for the most part, all run by greedy little feudal lords who, through no real intention on their part, tend to squash creativity in favor of politics, and run the punishments and rewards within their realms, based upon penis size. And programmers get left in the backwash. They are, after all, the bottom of the feudal heirarchy in the modern corporate world.
Canopus, obviously, isn’t like that…
But this is what the chronic LATE DELIVERY from Matrox says to me. It says: here’s a company run by mediocre mental midgets who wouldn’t know a C language function from a page in a grade school primer. People who are constantly ‘saving money’ for their company by short circuiting the profit/reinvestment cycle, in order to fatten up their annual bonuses. 'Oh, you need us to purchase the latest Microsoft SDK's? Gee, that sure is a lot of money... Can't you guys just write your own, and get around that?'
It all comes down to this: all the writing on the wall, and all the past performance indicates that the RT2000 will most likely be late, and not a mature product when it finally does hit the shelves. It means that, most likely, anyone who buys one as soon as it’s finally released will simply be a BETA TESTER who got suckered into paying full retail to be part of the testing program.
I really hope that I’m wrong. But at this stage, after FIVE FREAKIN’ MONTHS, I have to call it like I see it.
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