RE: (affordable) stereo (live) looping?

[Catilyne <catilyne@icicle.net>]

>At 09:19 AM 7/17/2003 -0700, Greg House wrote:
> > Okay.  Well, we've got the 'discontinued' requirement down.
>
>Is the Echo Pro discontinued?? The Line 6 website still lists it as a 
>current
>product.
>
>Wow, I think you're right.  I had figured that that was the reason behind 
>the big $199 blowout.  And for a while you couldn't get one through 
>Zzounds or Musician's Friend, so I thought they'd been EOL'd.  I just 
>checked though, and it now looks like they're back up in mailorder for 
>$299 again, so perhaps they weren't discontinued.
>
> > However, like it or not, the Support guys are generally the 
>'gatekeepers'
> > to Devel, and this has two immediate implications.
>
>Now, this implies that the support people actually HAVE some contact with 
>the
>developers. This is not always the case. I worked in support at a major 
>computer
>company and the development happened in a totally different part of the 
>country,
>and my only contact with the developers was through email, and even that 
>didn't
>happen very often.
>
>Depends very much on the company size and its number of employees, I 
>think.
>
>I've worked for two different hardware manufacturers (one firewalls, the 
>other network traffic management), and the story was completely 
>different.  At the first company, we could simply walk across the 
>building 
>and poke out heads into the appropriate developer's door (they just might 
>wing a stapler at your head, but you could do it).  At the second 
>company, 
>the dev's are segregated off but still have that same sort of contact 
>with 
>individuals on the senior-level Support staff.
>
>Now, I also know the scenario you're talking about, however.  For 
>instance, that first company with which I worked was bought up by a major 
>multi-national network provider, and we then became their managed 
>firewall 
>arm.  In doing so, we added another product to our offering in that we'd 
>resell Checkpoint as well as our own products.
>
>Any time we escalated a Checkpoint problem, we'd have to forward a ticket 
>to their Support Center in Texas, who would then re-forward it to their 
>developers in Israel.  Ugh!  It would normally take at least two days to 
>get an answer for even the simplest problem (due to time zone 
>differences, 
>if nothing else), which was especially frustrating because we could have 
>just run upstairs for a solution if it had been related to one of our own 
>products.  The poor Checkpoint guys in Texas were just lost half the 
>time, 
>though, because they didn't have any visibility into anything anywhere...
>
> > Ultimately, it depends a lot on the company and its corporate culture
> > though, and it's hard to predict without some intimate knowledge of the
> > company.
>
>Precisely!
>
> From what little we know about Line 6, just curious which model you 
>think 
> they're closer to.  Any guesses...?
>
>         -c-

_____
"i want to reach my hand into the dark and *feel* what reaches back"
                                                 -recoil