Software vendors are notorious for asking you to send in your upgrade money or purchase their current product now in order that you may be among the first to receive the new product when it ships. JUST SAY NO. Ask a dBase IV purchaser if he got his money’s worth either by upgrading or 1st time purchase.

Many of the big boys COMPAQ, IBM, WORDPERFECT, MICROSOFT , LOTUS, BORLAND, ASHTON- TATE, FOX, 3COM and NOVELL, to mention a few, play the game. Unfortunately bigger does not mean better. For instance, ASHTON- TATE decided to ship a bug infested incomplete dBase IV 1.0 after missing more than one delivery date. This early product release has allowed ASHTON-TATE competitors to be winners at the expense of users. Of course now that word-of-mouth has gotten around, ASHTON-TATE is in deep trouble. A $19 million loss and over 200 employees terminated with no better outlook on the horizon.

WORDPERFECT has been dominant in word-processing for some time. MICROSOFT, in order to keep up, released its answer, WORD 5.0, in hope of surpassing WORDPERFECT. While WORD has some nice new features, the product has glitches. It has problems converting documents from the previous release of WORD. There are other problems related to hardware which have also surfaced. Once again the winner is the competition and the loser is the user. These bugs aren't as serious as ASHTON-TATE's but the product shouldn't have been released until corrected.

LOTUS did the right thing. Although around two years late and a loss in market share, Lotus 3.0 has hit the streets with favorable reviews. The jury is still out, but so far it looks like a good clean product. Users and LOTUS win.

There are many more stories like the ones above. The point is that the user generally gets the short end of the stick on early released products. The Japanese are getting more involved in software and hardware development. If our current vendors don't get their act together they could go the way of the American automobile industry by the year 2000. u