Program upgrades over net

Steve Philson (philson@nmr.chem.umn.edu)
Mon, 20 Sep 1993 14:28:11 -0500 (CDT)

I was just wondering if anyone had ever discussed with Bruker the
possibility of making upgrades of their spectrometer software available
over anonymous ftp, or some such electronic method. I am thinking mainly
of Aspect software, but some X-32 stuff as well seems to be priced
according to the media and the copying/packaging effort rather than the
notion of recovering their software development costs. This is great, but
a complete new distribution for Aspect now costs $450, which is not
trivial, and very hard to justify for many people given the lack of
detailed information on just what changes have been made. As a result, I
would estimate that the fraction of Aspects out there actually running the
current software is pretty small. Many smaller places are still running
whatever they got at their spectrometer's installation.

There are, of course, other reasons for not upgrading, including inertia,
or even dissatisfaction with changes in newer versions. (I pretty much
stopped trying to keep up after 87 when the integration resets began to
need an extra movement on the knob that they hadn't before, and when the
then new .EXE did not seem to work the way they were supposed to.) There
are however, probably a lot of ways that the new versions are improvements
on the old, and one way of encouraging their users to stay current is to
make the upgrades really free. I suppose that not everyone has both
access to the internet and a path between their Aspect and the rest of the
world, but almost anything can be connected to the Aspect's serial port
and transfer via Kermit, and more and more people are on the net.

Just a thought.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Philson philson@nmr.chem.umn.edu
Director NMR Lab 612-626-0297
Chemistry Dept. University of Minnesota