Novice needs help

[Rupp]

Come on now Steve. This isn't Cuba or Russia. Their bulletin boards would be no better as they would be slanted toward their choices as well. It's the age old Ford vs Chevy debate. The more passionate one is about their particular setup the more they are going to "lean" their posts in that direction. This is human nature. If all you really want are drones that do not have a passion about their particular setup then what you need are "reporters" writing articles about certain hardware and what is best. Oh wait that didn't turn out so well either. The nature of an open bulletin board system is to provide facts clouded with passion. Show me one that isn't. This is simply the nature of the open bulletin board system. I do believe that some of us are more passionate than others though.

 

[Steve]

As I stated above, people are going to be passionate about what they believe and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I am also passionate about certain things and will clearly state that at times. I never said I want bland drones and pages of boring facts. Passion and opinions are good and healthy. But I do believe there is a line between being passionate and an uber salesman. Telling people not to be misled is a GOOD thing. Telling them to do their homework is a good thing. But telling people not to be misled only to turn around and state your own opinions as gospel is not the right thing. There are a lot of new people coming on board looking for answers. I think they should get a healthy dose of fact, opinion and passion, just not told that one product is the best, period. Anyway, this has blown way out of proporation and I'm not going to make this personal or directed toward any particular company. Let's move on.

 

[Digger]

I thought everyone took everone else's best advice and molded it into what was best for themselves. There is no one best way to do things.

And I always try and remember that one person's Chevy is another person's Cadillac.

 

[Dean Roddey]

This is why I told him to read the respective support fora instead of just giving my opinion. I do read the support fora of our competitors regularly, so I know what the general atmosphere is with each product's user base. I believe that anyone who does the same will find that our support forum is the happiest, most collegial one out there, because no one is mad at us or feels we aren't doing them right. And that's because our product is solid, our attitude is open and we listen, we don't nickle and dime our customers, and we bend over backwards to meet customer needs, and everyone knows it. There literally is not a single thread on our forum of the sort that you will find fairly regularly on the boards of the other products being discussed here. I have never, ever deleted any post from our forum (well, a couple of sex site spam bots managed to make some posts and I deleted those) where someone was saying something negative about our product, while it's happened fairly regularly on other fora.

I think that that says something about our company and our product, and that's why I encourage people to read for themselves and make up their own minds. CQC might not be the ultimate in every single area, because it covers so many areas. It's strength is in very high integration of a lot of technologies into a single package. In the end, since everyone is looking for a system, that broad coverage in a single package makes a huge difference in the robustness and stability of the product, and the long term assurance that it will continue over time to work as a system.

That's my position. I'm not saying that other products aren't good at what they do, or that CQC does every single thing every one of them does, but that CQC offers (very roughly speaking since an exact measure would be difficult) 90% of ML and 90% of HS and 90% of Girder, all in one tight package, plus offering things that none of them offer such as complete network distribution.

Almost no one is going to have a deep understanding of all of these products. But we do have a good number of customers who have come over from other products, and they do have a good understanding of CQC and that other product.
So their opinions are relevant, though you may think that they are biased for some reason. I don't know of any CQC customer who has gone to another product.

 

[Rupp]

Dean,
What's your estimated user base at the moment and how long has CQC been in existence?

 

[Dean Roddey]

The product went 1.0 2.5 years ago, so I think it's been out plenty long enough for its long term robustness and quality to have become obvious, and for our customers to determine our true colors. It's been through 6 significant updates in that time, and 2 to 3 times that many smaller updates, all without more than trivial to small issues, quickly fixed.

Of course our customer base is currently 1/Nth of HS's or ML's. Everyone knows that. But we don't have 1/Nth the unhappy customers or negative posts. And our forward momentum is growing very rapidly, something that I think everyone is starting to see. We earned that momentum the old fashioned way, by making every customer happy.

People can of course interpret that as they see fit, but I think it says something important.

 

[DavidL]

Dean,
What you will find is that when you do have that next level of sales success, then you will have some dissatisifed customers. It only takes a VERY few to make a lot of noise to appear that they represent a larger portion of customers.

As far as deleting posts, that will come with that success as well - or you have made a very different business decision than all succesful companies do. There are a lot of personalities out there and some choose to display that in ways that aren't appealing to the majority. That is their perogative, just not on a commercial forum if it is to the detriment of the company or it's customers.

 

[Dean Roddey]

We'll see but I don't think that's going to happen. If your product and your company are without question doing the right thing and treating people right, a malcontent will have no impact, because their complaints will have no merit and everyone will know it. They are only dangerous if their complaints have some amount of merit, even if expressed in an overly negative or loud way. If they do have some merit, and the company reacts defensively and circles the wagons, everyone will recognize that.

Our support forums are obviously not without statements to the effect of, if you don't do X or Y then I cannot use your product, or product Z does this, why doesn't yours. We deal with these by being honest and saying, no our product doesn't do those things. We are sorry about that, but here are our reasons (if there are reasons other than just not enough time to get to it yet.) We don't get defensive or act as though such statements are dangerous to us. That's what customers are supposed to do. It tells us where we are lacking and what the problems are.

If you take such statements 'like a man' and are candid about the issues, then you just don't tend to get into arguments with the customer. I've seen how these things happen on other fora, and if you trace them back, it's almost always because of a posture of denial by the company, because the complainer has a legitimate beef and the company gets defensive about it and starts arguing with the customer instead of saying, thank you for you feedback, your position has merit, we are sorry about it and we'll fix it as soon as we can.

You will commonly see statements from people about how we take criticism well and respond to it positively, because we do and people respond to that in kind. And that's one of the big reasons that our forum is so friendly and productive.

 

[IVB]

As far as deleting posts, that will come with that success as well - or you have made a very different business decision than all succesful companies do.

Wow, David. I had no idea you had a direct pipeline into every single succesful company out there to understand how they do business.

Gross generalizations like this that insinuate that Cinemar is omniscient in knowing what a successful company should do does not help the discussion, and is self-righteous at best.

 

[DavidL]

Yes, IVB, that was probably a bit overextending. But, name a company that doesn't? I haven't seen one myself.

Dean, that approach is used by many including Cinemar and appears to be Homeseer as well. Good people trying to make good products.

 

[Dean Roddey]

I dunno. I've seen numerous unhelpful, defensive, argumentative posts from that Tinker guy on the HS forum. That creates a confrontational atmosphere. There's a difference between being good people (which I'm completely sure that they are) and dealing well with criticism.

With Cinemar, I don't think it's because of any Tinker'ish type attitude or anything, but a legitmate beef that the company went for a very long time without any significant product releases and customers were not happy. That caused a lot of complaints, and there was some defensive attitude that I've seen, though it went on so long that probably any company would have been by that time.

 

[electron]

I hope you guys don't mind, but can we please start a seperate thread about this issue, so we can keep this thread on topic, and help svous with his questions. Thanks!

 

[Dean Roddey]

Sorry. He mentioned he wasn't finding a lot of technical reasons to make a decision, so I pointed out some other reasons, which I think are quite legitimate differentiators of companies, but that lead it off in another direction. A lot of the info still was useful I think, even if not strictly OT. I assume that tangent has probably run its course at this point anyway. I've said what I wanted to say on that front, well more than I wanted to say really but that often happens in these conversations.

 

[electron]

I agree it's useful information, but I think it will only create more confusion, since we aren't really answering all his questions, that's all.

 

[DavidL]

Ok, back on track now.
"C. What is the difference between mainlobby and Maestro interfaces?
They are both offered on the HS web page and I am not sure if I will
need one or both? I am thinking about Mainlobby but wanted to make
sure."

Maestro is very new and truly is a front end to Homeseer. MainLobby is a complete home automation system that can also be used as a front end for Homeseer (or others). The advantage to MainLobby here is any devices that Cinemar supports that Homeseer doesn't can be used by either when ML and HS are integrated together.

Maestro leverages the user's setup of Homeseer more effectively than MainLobby / MLHSPlugin does today. What that means is that if you define a HS house code to be a "Light", then Maestro continues that catagorization in it's user interface. With MainLobby you design your scenes and put graphical representation of a "light" on that scene and then associate it with the Homeseer device.

This brings up one of the core differences: With Maestro you get one person's idea of what a great user interface should look like, navigate, colors, etc. Because it's "locked down", it makes it much easier to programatically work easier "out of the box". With MainLobby, you can either reuse the interface that comes with MainLobby 3 or modify it, or throw it away and start from scratch, or reuse user contributed scenes and build your system the way YOU want it. To match your house. To match your interiour paint scheme. For the hardware you want to control.

If you are just looking for a quick update of a pretty user interface for Homeseer, then Maestro may be a good bet. Still too new in my opinion to know if the bugs are worked out.

If you are looking for a customizable front end for Homeseer, then MainLobby is the best there is (there goes that "best" word again ) As the MLHSPlugin is Homeseer's largest selling plugin, that should tell you something. Maestro hasn't been around long enough to expect to compete with that fact.

Maestro is cheaper than MainLobby. MainLobby 3 combo is $149 plus MLHSPlugin is $40. But, Maestro says that their prices will increase beyond the introductory price which is something like $135. MainLobby has many additional addons which does raise the price, but Maestro doesn't have many updates yet at all and no pricing on things that don't exist yet. If you act fast, you can still purchase MainLobby 2 for $59 which works just fine for Homeseer. This is available either from Homeseer's shopping cart or direct from Cinemar.

Hope this helps.