While this post here pertains to your "SN Personal Edition" (note: i bought 3 of them for our Mac users here at SLS), i was under the impression (wrongly now it seems) that your programmers there at 3DConnexion have already written, tested, and delivered a patch (or "driver"?) for the (3!) "Space Explorer(s)" that i also bought (for our actual in-house design team) to optimize their use for the Second Life 3D world platform/client.
Alas, no.
While as a new customer, so eager to be so excited and brag about your great hardware to the 1000's that lecture to and write for each year in the 3D industry, i want you to know that I am just seeing RED right now.
As a new customer and would-be fan who just, in trust, invested over $1300 of our small start-up budget on your hardware to apply it to our 3D design work in the worlds largest ever online 3D world of Second Life, I promise to keep my communications here entirely rational and sincere; and therefore i expect and will not rest until i get answers to the following.
Reading through the forum history of numerous, similarly incredulous, would-be grateful customers as they have all but begged your company to provide a timely fix to this gross developmental oversight, I was stunned to find a consistently cavalier attitude nearly as professionally unsupportive from a product design/customer support standpoint as strategically shortsighted from a marketing and PR agenda.
So let me get this straight:
As one of the leading 3D design hardware manufacturers in the world you feel that the world leading online 3D virtual universe of Second Life is not worth the time (and how much time could we be talking here if in the vacuum of no help from you your customers go and figure out work-arounds in a matter of hours) to do-up a custom mapping patch?....in over a year??
To quote your own response in your own forums from almost a year ago already:
"Hello stevah:
Thank you for your post.
We are in evaluation with Second Life currently but no commitment or schedule to be posted at this time.
Ziva Nissan
3Dconnexion, Inc."
Give, me, my team (that waited with so much excitement for your product after the $1300 investment), the many (MANY) other 3DConnexion cutomers pleading with you in your forums, AND the 20,000,000+ (that's MILLION) of SLife members registrants to date a very deserved BREAK.
This is the cornerstone of a pre-BOOM in your industry and you could be LEADING it.
If this is NOT a 100% no-brainer (that you should never have made anyone wait for a driver to this leading 3D online platform, or any) given that you are a for-profit business, I will personally PAY YOU to explain to me how your company could not prioritize the programmer time to write a simple patch for:
- an online 3D community with a history of millions and millions of people new to 3D and so excited, optimistic and perfectly demographic'd to BUY and brag about your great hardware
- the first one only already seven (7!) major such world wide online 3D virtual worlds that are already commanding over US $1 BILLION in capital investment in '06-'07.
- (.... would go on but its just too embarrassing to list all the business-sound, market classic reasons for you to have had this working already...).
You guys could be bumping your sales while advancing your user group while leading the industry while honoring your current customer-community while positioning your company and product-line and the forefront of the massive transition (over this next decade) as the WWWeb goes 3D.
But instead your forum is full of your own employees telling your own customers ".....we suggest you approach Microsoft directly to write a ....", etc.
If your reply does not (at least) begin with genuine empathy (before offering any justifications which you feel your customers must understand/adjust) for what in every respect appears as a radically short-sighted, uncaring, and self-defeating patch/driver development policy, I will be immediately returning our purchase and withdrawing our advocacy.
Standing by with very sharp attention (and still some hope),
David M.
Co-founder Second Life Synergetics, LLC
