Posted by Dave on July 31, 1999 at 22:24:46:
In Reply to: Re: Sound card compatability posted by Bianca Winkens on June 16, 1999 at 12:37:53:
I spoke to Dragon Systems on two occasions within the last two weeks regarding introduction of Speaking Naturally for the Mac. First was a sales manager, then later tech support. The sales manager essentially blew me off like I was asking a stupid question. But actually it's a hot potato for Dragon. The tech support rep said that yes, definately, they will be introducing the product, but there is no intro date set by the company.
C'mon people, you know what this means. Have you read the posts in this forum? people have had a bear of a time making Power Secretary and Dragon Voice Power Pro work without disabling nearly all the extensions. Special problems with certain Mac Performa models and 8.5x+ is very dubious.
Already Dragon has taken a financial bath on this one. So they want to get it right. But on the other hand, if they weren't so in to looking good and covering their financial *ss, they could have thrown more techs at it or dealt with it honestly, said there were major flaws, and they would have the integrity to make it right, including all the old users at substantial discounts (ie, just above their cost). But h*ll, the bottom line is all that's imortant these days and short-term profits, rather than impeccability and search for excellence (or is it?).
Maybe I'm being too hard here. Maybe there is something about the Mac platform that is harder to work in concert with the extensions for other applications. Maybe we all have to wait for OSX sitting on top of a Unix kernel, where all the apps run effectively independent of one another, to stop having extension conflicts. It can't be that they think that Apple is too small a market, with all the Fortune execs running around with Powerbooks and Apple posting its largest profits in years.
Yah, maybe they just want to get it right this time. Let's hope so.
Hey, Dragon, there is a whole Mac market out here that wants to buy your voice rec software. You know, stuff that works without pausing, "speaking naturally" and all that. What do you say Dragon? How soon?