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Richard Estes wrote:
> It seems we are picking on Equis, No I have sold many copies with my praise
> as a user, remaining honest about faults.
That is my perspective too. For the price of MS, I think it delivers a lot,
and is better than the competition in its price range. My contentions on this
list have been the lack of responsiveness of Equis to user input, and to their
downright indifference and "holier than thou" treatment of users.
As I've said before, I began with either 1.0, or 1.5 (think it was 1.5) when
all it did was to display a chart and very little else. Equis called me to
upgrade to 2.0 and I wasn't interested but they said it had improved
considerably. I bought it, and what they said was true. There was no
comparison with the previous version.
During the 12 or more years of using MS I have never received a "Customer
Survey" of what users think of the product, or what users would like to see in
the product. If they rely totally on complaints, and then don't even follow
up on those, they are (and have) put themselves into a sad marketing position.
For me, if they would simply put back into MS what they have taken out and
destroyed, without any input from the user community, it would satisfy most
all of my requirements beyond what MS 6.5 is today. They have destroyed the
Macros feature, which unlike any 3rd party Macro, allowed you to manipulate
securities within a directory so that you could run against only those
securities that you chose. You could then change the designation of the
securities in the directories, without any change to your macro, and you could
then make a new run of whatever it is you wished. At that time MS also had
the option to write all reports to a file, with the ability to append these
reports so you could send a stream of reports to a single .txt file. This, in
combination with their Macro capability was a powerful set of tools. They
have even destroyed the write to file and corresponding append capability. I
don't really care about the lies they have told me, I would just like to see
these three capabilities restored to where they were in 4.0. Again, they
deleted all of these (and one other that hit me hard too) without any input
from the user community. With these items added back in (I'm not asking for
anything new), I think that many of the testing over multiple securities
concerns would go away, as well as the many "saving reports" complaints that
have been on this list.
Alton wrote:
> Walter, I am a long time [3 yrs] user of OT. I have given it up because its
> signals never jibed with my read and were unusable, and because Nirvana was
> constantly upgrading the program and charging for it. I beta-tested the 3.1
> [or maybe 3.2] release and then right away they sprung 3.5 without ever
> mentioning it, and wanted to charge me for it. I emailed Ed and told him
> that was it for me and OT.
Somewhere around version 3.0 or 4.0 Equis offered a piece of software from
Nirvana Systems that did exactly what is described in Omni Trader. It did it
in a limited set of tests (about 30 or 40 if I remember). I bought it from
Equis (who got their commission) and found that the well publicized canned
routines (RSI, moving average crossovers, Williams %R, etc.) weren't very
productive and that it did not perform as advertised. That is, it was
supposed to produce a "signal" for the next day's trading day, and - it
didn't. It always produced a signal after the fact.
So, I guess where I am coming from is that I'm not asking Equis to produce a
Trade Station out of MS 6.5, but to either restore what they have
unscrupulously taken out of it, or to in some other way satisfy the user
community by providing the testing of multiple securities with an appropriate
means of adequate reporting (a single report that could be input to a word
processor).
CSI's Unfair Advantage program (data provider) has a web site that lists all
recent releases of UA, what changes/fixes went into them, and what changes are
going into future releases of their software. I have found UA to be quite
responsive to the concerns of their user community and they have made many
changes from input of not only my requests, but those of several others as
well. Why can't Equis do this with MS? Also, why can't Equis create a web
page that would accept a "score sheet" or some other form of input for items
to be included in future releases? Votes could be limited to one per email
address or some other scheme so that a user couldn't load the votes on his on
personal item. It would seem to me that if this were done it would greatly
increase the MS marketability, not only for upgrades for current users, but
for new users as well. Or, even better yet, why don't they do a mail-out
survey of existing MS users to find out their satisfaction level? And what
changes they would like incorporated into the program? Or is that Marketing
101, which they have seemed to skip.
The MetaStock Product Manager has not yet responded to my list of gripes and
concerns regarding MS, but must be fair in saying that he has only had a few
hours to do so.
Jim Brewster
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