Let\'s see... the possible options are that I work(ed) for Roxio, I work(ed) for Adaptec (or maybe even both, if I left when Roxio split), I\'m married to or dating someone who works or worked for one or both of these companies, I\'m friends with or roommates with someone from one or both companies, I work for or know well someone who works for a competitor, I am connected to a partner company, or I just watch the industry like a hawk.
... Or maybe all of the above. Or none.
At any rate, yes I do know the inside of that company (at least figuratively) pretty well. Actually, customer service wasn\'t bad at all, once you got past the long hold times that they suffered from from time to time. Then again, every CS or TS place that I\'ve ever dealt with has had long hold times. Engineering and QA were problematic on the whole until they cleaned house twice in a year. I have no indication that ECDC 6 will be better tested than ECDC 5 was, but I know that at least the gross skill level has risen in the 2 years since Adaptec started work on ECDC 5.
In case you were curious, ECDC 6 has a very pretty interface, but whether it will be the performance hog that ECDC 5\'s interface was remains to be seen. Also, with all the bitmaps in the GUI I\'m wondering how well this thing will work with text-to-voice screen readers (for the blind) or localize to different languages. ECDC 5 reportedly sucked for the blind folks, but I\'m basing that on an accessability report that a non-profit org put out on the industry which mentioned Roxio, not my own usage. I\'ll reserve judgement on perf., loc., and acc. as the copy that was smuggled to me was hardly complete.
One last note, your comment on audio was correct, but most (if not quite all) of the WAV issues were solved in 5.1, and 5.3 cleaned up all the rest that I knew about. The RAW-mode writes were never part of the spec, though, so you can\'t really fault them for not doing something they never claimed to do. The copier was always a sector-correct copy mechanism (data was copied), not a bit-correct copy or a pit/land-correct copy (all flaws, especially intentional copy-protection ones, are copied).
If I want bit-correct RAW mode I use either CloneCD or Nero, but more often the former. For general work I\'ll use ECDC (now that they modernized the engine behind it, the GUI suits me fine) or WinOnCD which is made by Roxio\'s European group and not marketed in the states, but which kicks serious ass. WinOnCD\'s interface is in the neighborhood of Nero\'s, clunky by usable, but it does everything that I could want and gives me as many or few options as I want to deal with for a given burn. My copy of WinOnCD 6 arrives soon! (tee hee)
At any rate, Roxio didn\'t put OEMs above customers, it put style over substance and cheap labor over quality engineering and testing. They make a boatload of income from OEM bundling, true, but if you check their SEC filings you see it is less than half of the income. Much of the rest comes from upgrade sales of people moviong from the OEM to the full version. As such, they need ther customers to like them, and they know this. In fact, they obsessed over the UI to the point that they sometimes ignored the actual code behind it, all to try and make the system easy for new users.
If they had paid less attention to the interface and more to integrating their tools (1 audio app, not 2.5) and building their drivers and installers/uninstallers to spec (Microsoft quietly took them to task more than a few times. Oops. Do I work for Microsoft, perhaps?) they would be in a better place with the enthusiasts instead of just hanging on to their core userbase, Ma and Pa Kent.
The upside? It looks like ECDC 6 will have a copier (no idea if this one does RAW or not), a data CD/DVD app, a SINGLE (!) audio app (record, edit, rip, burn, fold, spindle, mutilate, whatever), and a basic VCD/DVD video app. This is a nice change over 5. There may be other things to come, but when I saw it those were the four in-place modules. I assume it will get photo-editing of some sort and packet writing is pretty much a given. Besides that, we wait and see...
