>Thanks Mathijs for your full, frank and very helpful (as >usual) response. If a company can't be open and honest to it's customers, it is a sure sign to avoid them. That's is something I always tell everybody who works for LAGO. They can call me an idiot on any forum if that is true (probably is...) as long as they accept I will do the same to them.People on this forum pay for everything I consume, it's that simple. And as we never try to sell a single product but always want to get our customers to come back, it pays to be open, honest and direct. Besides, what would we have to hide?Mathijs

>BTW, exactly how big a company is Lago? I always imagined >you guys as a small but talented group. How many in number >are you? About 3 in the commercial side, 3 in ConDev (Concepts & Development) and 2 in CustSup (Customer Support). But almost all work we have done is by contractors as we believe that the work should be a hobby for the people who do the programming. We have one fulltime programming wizard (Maurizio Gavioli) who does all the non standard stuff. We are growing about 25% a quarter at this moment.I'm afraid most of them work 12 hour days. But as long as they are happy and we are having fun (and we do most of the time, not this weekend) nobody seems to mind. MathijsP.s. Good opportunity..... I need a project manager who is well into Gmax design. And I might need a new webmaster as well :-)

As much as I do appreciate YOUR honesty in this matter, Mathijs, I was somewhat surprised to have received the following e-mail from your people this morning w/ regard to this weekends server outage:-=-=-=-Dear Sir,if our servers are overloaded when you attempt to download, sometimesthey may experience an error such as breaking the download at 99% orcorrupting the zip file, showing the message "file not found" or "pleaseinsert username and password" (our FTPs do not require username nor pwdthough) etc...The files are ok though; as said above all af this errors depend on theoverloading of the FTPs.Now the solutions:First of all I suggest you use I.E.5.5 or superior with NO surfing manager.Moreover, I suggest you use a good download manager in order to easilydownload our software; try Fresh Download, you find it atwww.frehdevices.com.Many users reported that this new delivery manager interacts very well withour FTPs.With friendly greetings,Name Withheld to Protect the Less than Innocent ;-)LAGO Customer Support Senior Officerwww.lagoonline.com-=-=--=-Why is your support staff trying to cover this fiasco up by pushing the onus onto the customer?JPS. On an upnote, I was able to purchase Honolulu from simmarket yesterday and I am quite pleased with it ;-) Had my regcode in 10 minutes.

>As much as I do appreciate YOUR honesty in this matter, >Mathijs, I was somewhat surprised to have received the >following e-mail from your people this morning w/ regard to >this weekends server outage: Totally incorrect email indeed. Would it be possible for you to send me the email you send so I can kick some [email protected]. Mathijs

>I gave up and bought UK2000 Part 5 instead. Highly >recommended. Yes, although I advise you to keep some cash for our Reggio Calabria and Twin Otter releases this week, it IS good software.Mathijs

I would rather not single anyone out. Perhaps if you pointed your entire support team at this thread here on AVSIM and explained why the response was inappropriate - you could achieve the same end. The person who wrote the e-mail will know who they are ;-)There are worse crimes than this :). It's a little annoying to be treated like the uninformed idiot (considering I later became aware of the REAL reasons behind your server outage). Honesty and a simple "sorry for the inconvenience" would have been a more appropriate response to my inquiry.Dumb things like server outages happen despite our best efforts and intentions. A similar thing happened with a SimFlyer's purchase I made sometime ago. I don't recall the exact circumstances, but I DO remember the response which included an apology and a free copy of software. PSS has made similar gestures in the past. While I certainly don't expect free software (although I won't argue with it *lol*), such gestures have gone a long way in earning my respect and these companies have gotten my continued business in return.Cheers,JPS. Server fubar's aside: I am thoroughly enjoying my Honolulu purchase. Your people really achieved a nice balance of performance and detail.