wrote cust serv 2x and no response. phew!!!

Everything related to our flagship word processor.
Post Reply
K-9
Posts: 71
Joined: 2007-08-22 18:03:34

wrote cust serv 2x and no response. phew!!!

Post by K-9 »

I wrote customer service 2x requesting the following.

No response.

is there any family plan available for the educational writer pro to cover multiple machines?


not an answer.

Again this proves my frustration with the actual company side of a beautiful application.

Does anyone know the answer to this? I have a single license - but I would like to legally and ethically add a couplf of more machines and people on it in my family.
dshan
Posts: 334
Joined: 2003-11-21 19:25:28
Location: Sydney, Australia

Post by dshan »

The complete list of purchasing options for NWP is available here. The answer to your question is obvious and no amount of wishful thinking will alter it.
K-9
Posts: 71
Joined: 2007-08-22 18:03:34

Post by K-9 »

I guess there isn't then... too Bad! thanks.
User avatar
scottwhitlock
Posts: 174
Joined: 2004-10-26 07:10:40
Location: Tucson, AZ

Post by scottwhitlock »

I'd like to add some context to K-9's experiences here (or at least another side). I've always found the customer service reps extremely responsive to any question I've ever asked, whether through email or through the official Nisus members of this forum. As a matter of fact, it is this customer service and the community that it has created both around Nisus Writer Express/Pro and around this forum (especially the Macros forum, where Martin sometimes offers to write macros for you) that kept me sticking with Nisus although NWE did not have some of the features that I needed.

K-9, welcome to the forum. There is a long history here and we are very collegial. On it, we get hands-on advice and a direct ear to the actual programmers of the software (Martin and Dave). If you have a question, first see if it has already been answered previously (as you would do with any forum that has a long history). If not, feel free to ask it here. Someone, if not Martin then Hamid or Anne or dshan or some other long time member, will most likely answer your question very quickly. Usually, if a member answers your question the same as Martin would, you will not hear from the developers. If not, Martin will chime in. Where else can you get such dedicated attention? Hardly poor customer service.

If you want that, go check out Microsoft Office 2004's forum. Oh, they don't have one? Oh, you can't talk to the developers? Oh, they won't help you write a VBA script? Oh, they won't give you any information of how they plan on replacing a programming language (VBA) with a scripting language (Applescript)? Oh, you don't know exactly when Office 2008 will be out or what will be in it? Exactly...

Anyway, again welcome, and feel free to ask questions. NWP is a fabulous product and its users are good people and its developers work very hard for us. NWP is a 1.0 product and still has quite a few limitations (and quite a few workarounds for those limitations). But as you can see here from the times Martin has responded to our questions (dumb and perplexing), customer service is hardly an issue.

Scott
MacBook Pro 15
2.66 Ghz Core i7
8GB RAM
10.8.3
NWP 2.0.4
iPad 3
K-9
Posts: 71
Joined: 2007-08-22 18:03:34

Post by K-9 »

Scott - thanks but I am not lying - I sent to emails and no response in a few days already - that IS NOT customer service. Sorry to say.

Martin - I figured he had something to do with the company - and not knew who he was - but he does seem to help here and that was not what I am talking about.

I do appreciate the actual forum; however, I am dead serious that I am not impressed with the actual companies tech help or customer service. You obviously have had a better relationship; mine so far, had been less than stellar!

Sorry- I was just stating the real facts.

and yes - I love the Application!!!
User avatar
scottwhitlock
Posts: 174
Joined: 2004-10-26 07:10:40
Location: Tucson, AZ

Post by scottwhitlock »

K-9,

I by no means wanted to imply that you were fibbing :). Just wanted to give you some insight into how things usually work around here.

Remember, Nisus is a small independent Mac developer. They do not have the resources that companies like Apple and Microsoft have. I don't know how many employees they have, but in my experience most of the customer service is done on this very forum. You usually get a quick answer to any question you have here. Their support page sends you here first for a reason.

Secondly, a lot of tech support is done by the members of the forum (like finding your elusive help.pdf, for example). We are a community of users who learn from each other, although we do not officially represent Nisus. It is the #1 reason I use the program (other than it just feels right).

Any person who officially represents Nisus will have the official Nisus logo and "Official Nisus Person" under their name. You can take a response from them as a response from the company, in most instances. This is usually Martin. And sometimes Dave.

I hope this helps a bit. Also, this is pretty much the rule for most independent Mac developers (Omni's forum is kicking, and so is Mellel, and even Pages' forum at Apple Support is much more responsive than Apple). You usually can tell a lot about the quality of a program by the quality of its forum. Nisus' forum is one of the strongest.

S.
MacBook Pro 15
2.66 Ghz Core i7
8GB RAM
10.8.3
NWP 2.0.4
iPad 3
K-9
Posts: 71
Joined: 2007-08-22 18:03:34

Post by K-9 »

Thanks Scott!


p.s. just got a couple of emails from Dave Larson - all is well - thank you too Dave!
Shade
Posts: 3
Joined: 2007-09-17 14:12:43
Location: USA

Nisus Support Was NOT Customer-Focused With Me, Either!

Post by Shade »

As did K9, I had an unpleasant incident with Nisus Customer Support. I paid $79.00 for Nisus Express October 2005. To upgrade to Pro would cost an additional $45.00, which is the same cost of Nisus Express, now. I feel $45.00 is a hefty upgrade charge when I paid the same amount for Nisus Express that Nisus is now charging for Nisus Pro. I am not a person who has a problem paying developers for great software but I was not comfortable with Nisus' charges.

I wrote Nisus. I did get a response! The response said Nisus was not tying my hands, forcing me to upgrade.

I then found posts from others online - after receiving the offensive response - that said they had stopped dealing with Nisus because of some previous "uncool upgrade charges," if you will.

I am not saying that some other company has better or worse service. I simply do not feel the upgrade costs are right in this case. I really do not think the response was right, professional, nor did it address the situation I presented to Nisus.

I discovered today that Nisus has presented Nisus Express 3 with a $30.00 upgrade charge. I understand there are times when developers may need to recover costs of development, but something in this mix just doesn't feel right at the moment!

My pique, at this time, is with Nisus customer service and sensitivity, not the Nisus Express program. I am not familiar enough with Nisus Pro to say anything other than I hope it is thorough, fine, and non-taxing on the CPU.

Everyone should have a chance and feel free to state their experiences, if they wish and do not violate terms of use.

I wish the pricing had been presented with a better spin, perhaps, and that I had never received such an insulting response.

I am yet thankful for good developers who share their labors with us and seem to care.
Shade
User avatar
scottwhitlock
Posts: 174
Joined: 2004-10-26 07:10:40
Location: Tucson, AZ

Post by scottwhitlock »

that font size is the real travesty of this rant.

I feel like I need to remind you that Nisus has not charged for an upgrade to Express in four years (which included a MAJOR upgrade in 1.5 to 2.0, and then another in 2.0 to 2.5). Also, they announced Express 3.0 almost two months ago, on the blog. Express 3.0 is a worthy upgrade, and adds a lot of useful features. However, if you don't think you need to update, then don't. 2.7 will run the same either way. I agree with Nisus here.

I get so tired of hearing people bitch about this. Do you expect Nisus just to give their work away? Look at Endnote. They charge a full upgrade fee ($99) for bug fixes every year. How can you really think a $30 upgrade after 4 years is unfair? Or a $45 upgrade to NWP, when Nisus didn't even have to do that, considering that you were updating from NWE to a more full-featured and different product. They could have only offered an upgrade to NWE 3.0 from NWE 2.7.

And you have the right to rant. Rant all day if you want. However, you should know that many of us have been customers of this company for a decade or more and have much more experience with them than you. And you should not get angry when we tell you that you're being unfair, shortsighted, and precious.

Scott
MacBook Pro 15
2.66 Ghz Core i7
8GB RAM
10.8.3
NWP 2.0.4
iPad 3
User avatar
martin
Official Nisus Person
Posts: 5227
Joined: 2002-07-11 17:14:10
Location: San Diego, CA
Contact:

Post by martin »

Yes, the font size was quite unreasonable. I have edited his post, but only to remove the superfluous sizing.
K-9
Posts: 71
Joined: 2007-08-22 18:03:34

Post by K-9 »

As stated before and in another thread; I am deeply sorry for opening a can of worms. I apologized to Dave, martin, Nisus, and others here.

Nisus is a wonderful Application and I am into my first month not 2nd decade. Price wheher academic and regular is an honest price. I have paid hundreds of dollars manytimes over for various other Apps., so for as good as this is - all seems rather fair to me.

Sorry for starting a few funky threads.
Shade
Posts: 3
Joined: 2007-09-17 14:12:43
Location: USA

Post by Shade »

I am totally new to forums so PLEASE forgive if I did something inadvertently like use a large font. By the way, Scott, I HAVE to use large fonts due to a slip by an ophthalmic surgeon a bit ago.

Perhaps if I had been with Nisus ten years I would espouse more homogeneously but I haven't. That's the whole point!

I paid $79 in support of Nisus not two years ago because the vendor seemed to be doing something viable in freeing users from Microsoft frustrations. I actually have not been able to effectively familiarize myself with Nisus Express since purchasing it, but I had planned to stay with it

I DID write Nisus. Nisus did not respond to me saying, "We have not charged for an upgrade in ten years and we practically gave one major upgrade away."

Nisus DID respond in an abrasive manner.

I actually was searching for an answer to something when I came to the forum. I saw K9's entry and thought I would expose my bruised feelings.

The atmosphere becomes more inimical. I leave before it becomes impossible to use either Writer, which I honestly believe are most probably top-shelf products.

Thanks again for adjusting the text size, but I most assuredly am not a his. javascript:emoticon(':o')
Shade
dshan
Posts: 334
Joined: 2003-11-21 19:25:28
Location: Sydney, Australia

How This All Started, And Why It Costs Money To Play

Post by dshan »

Shade,

I think perhaps some of your issues with the upgrade charges to Pro and now Express 3.0 may be due to an understandable confusion about the two product lines and their history (not having lived through the history makes it hard to realise how we all got here from Express 1.0 and Nisus Writer Classic).

When Nisus Writer Express 1.0 was released (in 2003 if I recall correctly) it was a totally new product, a native Mac OS X Cocoa-based WP product from Nisus who had for many years previously sold another WP, Nisus Writer (now called Nisus Writer Classic), for Mac OS 9 and earlier versions. Being a totally new WP, not a port of the earlier OS 9 product, NWX 1.0 bore very little resemblance to the earlier product (which was at version 6.x I think when Express was released) in either it's user interface or feature set (and used a different file format, RTF, instead of the old Writer's proprietary format). In general NWX scored high marks for being a native OS X product and having a simple, clean and intuitive interface and using a widely supported open file format, but it was judged harshly by many for a rather limited feature set compared to it's older and more mature predecessor Nisus Writer Classic. Nisus acknowledged this and said they intended to add more features to Express over time and use it as the foundation of a new native OS X line of products. They set about doing exactly that - over the next few years they released 1.0.x versions, 1.x versions and finally 2.x versions of Express; these fixed reported bugs and added numerous new features to the product (and oh boy, didn't the users have fun trying to outbid each other on what the next new features added should be!).

All of these updates to Express were given away free by Nisus to their existing Express customers. As I see it (i.e. this is my personal opinion only) this was a tacit acknowledgment by Nisus that the product as originally released was not really adequate in the features department (even as an entry-level product as the "Express" name implied) and it would have been difficult to justify charging for some of the updates that simply added features most competing WP (and their own previous product) already had and were now considered pretty "standard" in any WP). Then a while ago (I think it was after NWX 2.7 was released, but my memory may be faulty here) one of the Nisus team announced that they were now felt that NWX was (I'm paraphrasing here) pretty much "up to scratch" in terms of features. I realised that this was a hint - the days of free feature upgrades was coming to an end and from now on Nisus would be running the process like a normal commercial software vendor, i.e. upgrades would cost money. The question was how much and was the other part of their originally stated goal - a family of OS X native products - going to happen now that the foundations had been laid with Express?

The release of Nisus Writer Pro 1.0 answered the second question. Here was a new product, built on the existing Express code foundation, that offered professional writers the extra features that Express did not - TOC, indexes, etc. - features they had been crying out for ever since Express 1.0 was released. Now you had two Nisus WP products to choose from: Express for those who didn't need all the features of a professional-level WP and Pro for those that did. Pro was priced at $79. At around this time the price of Express 2.7 was reduced from it's original $59.95 to $45 to further emphasize the difference between the two products, and Nisus offered existing Express users who wanted to move to Pro an upgrade at $45. It's important to note here that they didn't force existing Express users to upgrade to Pro, they announced that now they had Pro out the door they were going to work on a new feature-enhanced version of Express (3.0) for those who didn't require Pro. However, given their previous statement about the state of Express circa 2.7 noted previously, I think only an optimist would have expected NWX 3.0 to be yet another free upgrade.

So when Nisus customer service told you that you weren't being forced to upgrade to NWP at $45 they were simply telling the truth, not trying to insult you - Pro is viewed as a different (note the version number - 1.0), more feature-rich product for customers that require more from a WP than Express offers, and it's priced accordingly. If you bought in with NWX when that was the only product they offered and you do require the Pro features, you can upgrade to it from Express for $45. If you are happy with the feature set of Express and don't need the extras Pro offers you can stay with Express and take advantage of the lesser, but still significant if you need them, enhancements in Express 3.0 for a $30 upgrade fee. Or you can stay with 2.7 and it costs you nothing extra (but you have to live with any bugs or other limitations addressed in 3.0 and later). Your choice.

The pricing of upgrades is always a contentious issue (and I've said before that I think $30 to upgrade a product that now costs only $45 new is too steep, $15-$20 would have been more reasonable IMHO) but you only have to check the prices many other vendors are charging for upgrades to see that >50% (often 66%+) of the new purchase price is now pretty normal, alas. I upgraded to Pro and am very happy with it.

I'm sorry to have made this post so long bit I think it's important to have an understanding of the history behind the Nisus Writer Express/Pro products to see why they are being priced and sold the way they are. For new users, since NWP 1.0 came out, it's easy - choose the product that best suits your needs and go from there - but I can see it could be confusing for those like you who came in halfway through the party.

I have no idea what the future holds, if both products will continue to be sold and enhanced, etc. but I assume that will depend on how the money flows - if nearly everyone buys or upgrades to Pro then Express will presumably fade away eventually, but if it can carve out a profitable niche market for Nisus they will hopefully continue to sell and support it for years to come.
Shade
Posts: 3
Joined: 2007-09-17 14:12:43
Location: USA

Post by Shade »

I thank you immensely for your understanding and most informative response. It was not too long; it sheds light.

The only thing I was saying from the beginning is charging $45 (or $30) to upgrade from Nisus Express - when I paid $69.00 for a product that is now $45 - is excessive. I think you hit on this.

I did go back and re-read the response from Nisus and in light of your response, I can stomach the response.

I did not have an opportunity to buy Nisus Express at $45 and I honestly feel like I've already paid $24 of the upgrade price Nisus now wants.

I did not get any of the free upgrades Nisus gave. Those who came before me got a break and those buying after me get a break.

I still don't see that Nisus is sensitive to my plight although I do understand their struggle to stay competitive and solvent.

I really do thank your for your considerate response, in any case. It has helped the situation tremendously!
Shade
Post Reply