Not to sound like a broken record, but I have used Esprit since back when it was called Vantage.
It matured into a freaking awesome package about 10 years ago, but it needed a Unix platform to run.
They took the look-n-feel and made it work on WinNT; still awesome.
Then they tried to make a Windows look-and-feel interface, and it was like they started from scratch, and were typing all of the code left-handed. It was very pretty, but it was a step WAYYYY back from where they had been. The functionality was only 50% of where it had been, and the stability was horrible.
They've gotten marginally better in the past 3 years, but I still think they've given up a lot of the 'stuff' that made them great.
And true, they do have a good support staff, but it is my opinion that since the jump to the native windows interface, their support staff (and R&D staff as well) have been mostly doing reactive service, bug fixes, and workarounds.
I hope that they can someday make it back to where they were in days gone by!  |