SGI renderer
Speaking as a minion of Darth, :-), I'd say there's a lot to be said for One
Standard Official Way of Saying Things. As soon as you start to hedge or imply
or wink or give somebody the impression that product X will be available by Y
on platform Z, you're in trouble. After all, it came from an official employee
of Autodesk on an official forum on Compuserve, which imght as well have been
in print. See what I mean? Here at Syndesis, I train the new employees with a
"cheat book" that has the right way to explain everything. Just yesterday, for
example, a customer called and demanded to talk to the president. He told me
that he'd called three times in the last two days (uhm, sir, we weren't open
Thursday through Sunday) and that no one he talked to had the answers he needed
(dealer price, availability, etc.) although the questions he told me he asked
could've been answered by anyone from the receptionist on down. And I talked
to everyone in the office to confirm something hadn't gone wrong, and sure
enough, they confirmed that he called last Wednesday but that they did give him
the simple answers he required.
Those darn customers, they're always right, even when they're wrong. 🙂 With
all the customers Autodesk has, with all the people out there who live life on
the bleeding edge of technology who can redeem themselves in the eyes of the
boss by making good decisions on the next hardware and software outlay, I doubt
they want to admit personal creativity into the explanation of future product
releases.