Gibbs Raising Maintenance Fees 23%

[Rocko1]

Wow, i almost had a cardiac arrest when i received a notice to continue maintenance for Gibbs. They want $1,687 instead of $1,300 a year. That is a 23% increase. On top of that you do not even get printed manuals and they make you pay to get ones from a printer for an additional charge.

[hoidahl]

And when you post it on their web site they remove your post.

[Rocko1]

Yes, I know they have deleted 3 of my postings even mentioning the increase on the maintenance. I think my days of dealing with Gibbs are coming to an end. Hell I paid for maintenance for over 5 years and they never changed the Solid Surfacer Module till a beta this month. Even then they are still behind others for mold work. I think them getting bought out is going to make prices go up. Wow just checked they (Gibbs)banned me from the message board that I pay to belong too? It states on the screen For Reason: None Given. I guess they must be a tad sensitive about how much they are increasing the maintenance fees.

[Jason Heyse]

You guys need to go back to your calculator, Gibbs maintenance did go up but just a small %. Gibbs is still not as expensive has most of the other cam maintenance out there.

[Rocko1]

Funny you mention that, it went up almost quite a bit and for what? There is no reason for it going up at all. They have been lazy on doing anything new with their 3d toolpath generation for over 4+ years. Also if you think during these economic times people are going to sit around and get porked on ever increasing maintenance charges you are wrong. I have received nothing for all the maintenance that I have paid in over 4 years. Hell they do not even get back to you on problems you find with the software. Also it seems you are new here Jason, perhaps a Gibbs employee or a VAR trying to quell the truth? I would like you to deny that the Solid Surfacer module (3axis) has been updated in 4+ years. You and I both know they havent touched it.

[Jim Jarvis]

Jason Heyse is a Gibbs value added reseller. His company is Texas Offline.

http://www.texasoffline.com/about.html

Jason can you tell us why you and your partner no longer sell your Gibbs Virtual CD Trainer and why it didn't get any updates for years?

Jason what solution do you offer for those who can't afford $400 per day for Gibbs training class?

[Jason Heyse]

We had a V6 and V7 training CD's and I had finished the V8 Mill CD when V9 was coming around. I did not go any farther because there are over 50 hours per CD to redo and print and burn. I wanted to wait on V9 to come. Granted it took longer than I thought and I'm sure longer than everone else also.

V9 has so many NEW things for every module Gibbs has, it is a complete release. You won't be dissapointed with it no matter what your running.

As far as training, when you say you can't afford to spend $400 per day to learn Gibbs you really not considering the amount of money ( time is money) you will spend trying to learn Gibbs on your own. The cost for the training is money well spent when our customers comes to class they start programming machines when they get back to their shops. Now the real money is being made.

I am starting an ONLINE version of our training that can be bought by hours, days, weeks or by month. Coming Soon to a website near you.

[cncgooroo]

That Sucks .... must be to compensate for gas!

Anyway you can print the manuals out yourself, or you should be able to.

They printed them at the company I used to work at some time ago. If you cannot figure it out I may be able to drop an e-mail and find out how he did it. But it made some nice manuals. I want to say it was in the tutorial folder but I may be wrong.

And it still sucks about the maintenance... But i do like Gibbs as much or better than most others.

[Jim Jarvis]

Jason thanks for your response. Here are my comments based on your response.

"As far as training, when you say you can't afford to spend $400 per day to learn Gibbs you really not considering the amount of money ( time is money) you will spend trying to learn Gibbs on your own."

You're right time is money but many job shops don't wish to pay to train their employees. This is the common job shop mindset today and it's not going to change. That often means a machinist has to pay out of his own pocket to get ahead. You have resellers offering training CD's for say Surfcam for $250 that cover all of Surfcam's 2D functions and rotary machining. That's the price range Gibbscam training should be in. The price is even lower for Mastercam training CD's.

"The cost for the training is money well spent when our customers comes to class they start programming machines when they get back to their shops. Now the real money is being made."

The real money is made by the shop owner not the machinist-programmer.

"I am starting an ONLINE version of our training that can be bought by hours, days, weeks or by month. Coming Soon to a website near you."

I prefer offline. You must like offline as well because you named your business Texas Offline.

How about giving machinists who have to pay for training out of their own pocket a break and changing rates they can afford? Why not court these machinists and make them loyal to you? It's not like Bill Gibbs cares about machinists/programmers as he's found ways to screw machinists over for many years. Witness his recent attempt to sell old recycled very poorly written Gibbs manuals on-line as something new.

I’d like to see you treat machinists who have to pay out of their own pocket right and build a loyal following of machinists in states not near Texas. The need is there. How about making a difference and fixing this long standing problem?

[HemiCuda]

Hello,

This is just our experience and I am not suggesting that anyone leave GibbsCAM for another CAM Package. Let me begin by stating that this is not a rant targeted towards GibbsCAM! One of the main reasons we left our Cam Software after more than 10 years was because of support costs and overly complicated software.

We changed our mindset to lean, mean and simple. The majority of our parts are not that complicated and don't require the heaps of extra features that most CAM systems today have acquired. My opinion only, most CAM systems today have focused on being so versatile that they have made their products overly complicated. We found that most new features were rarely, if ever used at all. The sad thing is, we paid for this every time our programmer hesitated to choose a command because he/she was not sure if its the right command. Too many options (my opinion only) proved to be a bad thing for us. So... we paid because our programmers constantly needed to be "new feature" trained, we paid because the software became cluttered with to many options and we paid every year for service to make it more complicated for ourselves (catch 22). In fact, though we paid for service we started not to update the software. Now a big portion of our service fees went towards new features that we would never use. We were paying every year for technical support only.

I am not picking on GibbsCAM here! Every main player (my opinion) has fallen into this trap. Higher service maintenance, too many options and harder to use / harder to train software. Are they (all CAM Companies) really trying to make our programming easier?

Sure if you have a shop that requires a CAM system that requires all these features, than fair enough and keep paying for it. I would suggest that we all take a step back, take a good look at what we are really programming and ask ourselves if our CAM system has out grown our requirements and budget.

All of this is based upon our frustration and pointed towards most of the major CAM Systems. Let me repeat that I think GibbsCAM is great software and this small rant was aimed towards all the main CAM players.

What did we do? We switched to a CAD/Cam Product that was extremely easy to use and charges no service maintenance. Simple menus, simple geometry creation, no charge to load solids, great CNC code and easy post processor edit/create tools. We no longer worry about our programmers holding us ransom, leaving our company or hiring new programmers. The software can be easily learned in a few hours and parts can be programmed shortly after. This is not a sales pitch so I will not mention the CAM package. I will tell you this type of mindset has changed our company and is like a breath of fresh air. And in regards to our programmers, they like this and have become actually better programmers. Our programmers now know that they have their jobs based upon their performance not just because they are the only Guy\Gal that knows how to use the CAM software.

Just my opinion, nothing but good wishes to GibbsCAM and the other CAM packages. Not picking on GibbsCAM here so don't waste time defending GibbsCAM. You don't have to, GibbsCAM is a great product!

Regards
HemiCuda