While I am here, I don’t like this “let’s take our ball and go home” attitude Zeila and Mo are showing. I would think they’d be apologetic about the delay and their lack of communication, but instead if we dare to be upset about it (at least in this blog), then they threaten to call the whole thing off, they can do whatever they want and the heck with everyone else. I think this type of attitude should be kept in mind when it comes to future support for this product. Thank you.

Thanks for writing the way I should have written, you said it very well. Just to explain something here, I used to be a project manager for a living. My office devloped hundreds of significant size software products. On some I was the lead, on others I was the worker bee helping my boss lead.

Did we ever fail to meet deadlines? Of course we did! Like everyone else writing here we were humans … and software is software. But I’ll tell you one thing, in the 15 years I worked for that office we _never_ did …

We never, ever, announced a delivery date on a major holiday then waited until after that holiday to announce we had fallen behind. That would have been just plain rude and tantamount to treating our customers, the reason for our being, as dirt.

All our products were outsourced … we had no programmers on staff and contracted out all the development work. Did our contract members of the team sometimes fail to deliver as needed? of course they did. But we worked as a team and we never, ever tried to shift the blame to them, publicly.

There was one office, us, who had the responsibility … internal schedule slips, bickering, even “firing” of contractors when on behind the scenes … never in front of our clients … because we certainly got the credit for our team’s successes, so it’s only proper that we took the blame for our team’s failures.

This has turned into a very good discussion and object lesson for those who plan to contract out projects of significance.

Rule One .. bad news is not wine, it does not improve with age. Communicate with those expecting of you on a _timely_ basis.

In other words, “Classic Mistakes”.

Z&M, don’t tarnish your names and your country’s name any further. Deliver as promise or go back underground as before.

That’s like if I invited someone to a Christmas party, and then they came and my door is locked and I’m not home. Then I call them all the next day and said “Sorry, I had to cancel because I didn’t like the caterers’ prices.” Would anyone like that?

I was so looking forward to the release and so it was a letdown to me that it didn’t happen yesterday, and I didn’t get notified about it till today. As I said, I understand stuff happens, and I am still looking forward to its release to ALL of us.

If the answer is at least one, then please keep talking.

We don’t need the money from AR, and we can choose to sell it to anyone we wish. As it is, we promised we will launch, and we did. But just not to everyone.

We have accepted a few more people to have access to AR just awhile ago.

Be Well,
Mo

Zeila

Silly me, I thought the reason for waiting weeks and weeks was to finish the product and do the testing … not to wait until the announced release date arrived and _then_ announce the course materials were not done right and (apparently) testing hadn’t been completed.

I know the scarcity method of marketing brings proven results but that doesn’t mean I like being used as a pawn in it. As we say in Colorado, this is not my first rodeo, I can see through the unseemly hype … and I wonder if Z&M have fallen into the trap of believing their own marketing?

I am interested in trying out a piece of software that makes finding high paying keywords and building a site around them easy … I am not interested in the rest of this manipulative “ballyhoo” … Zelia got pretty offended in the past when I termed their “come ons” “crappola”, but when you promise, promise, promise and then aren’t ready to deliver, what other word actually fits? (nothing personal, the actions speak louder than the words).

The true formula for internet success is, under promise and over deliver … this program certainly seems to have it backwards, or so Dave opines.

We didn’t use any software for our websites, we outsourced the development to companies in India mostly. But what we did more importantly to bring traffic to the websites, again and again, was more important.

But good luck with that. We wish you all the best.

Scott,
we are so tight right now managing the testers, so we are not ready to accept more testers.

I believe the outsourcers are now ready to start delivering again. We should be able to have the hard launch before 2008. Fingers crossed.

Zeila and Mo