longForm writing
Should I be a little narked with MacRabbit?
4 months ago
I am a huge fan of the editors Espresso and CSS Edit from MacRabbit. I have personally been using these apps since 2008 and do not recommend any other above these. CSS Edit blew me away when I first found out about it and Espresso was equally impressive.
Over the years I have provided much feedback, more recently testing the Kaboom release of Espresso 2 and providing my feedback which I feel was for a worthy reason. I also feel that the pricing of these products has always been excellent.
Outside of my own evangelism at 'home', I have ensured for our web projects at the School of Art we have the MacRabbit software installed on all the Macs (totalling over 185 Mac's now). Although there are some free alternative like JEdit, Netbeans and Komodo Edit (and I think other parts of the University use TextMate), I personally feel that the purchase of CSS edit and Espresso is very much justified in breaking down the coding barrier to Art students, especially as I encourage designing in the browser.
So when the new version (2) was released I logged in to see if my personal copy qualified for a free upgrade. I was advised that my original purchase of Espresso was too old as I bought Espresso on the 6th of April 2009 and CSS Edit about a year before. So I was thus 4 days to early to qualify for a free upgrade.
So I wrote to MacRabbit:
"I have been very active in helping with feedback on your products and evangelising your product at home and at work over the last few years. I have also requested the purchase of 185 Licences of CSS Edit and Espresso over the last 2 years (Winchester School of Art - University of Southampton) I know its cheeky but any chance I can get my personal copy for free ?"
The reply was
"We need to respect the upgrade deadline because it wouldn't be fair to users who don't think of emailing us. Instead, we decided to go for an aggressively low upgrade price everyone can enjoy."
I completely understood the date deadline but having put £9500+ worth of business towards MacRabbit I thought that might have swung it (I emailed them this too) and so I must admit I was a little bit annoyed, I have since purchased my own version of Espresso 2 (£24) I love it that much.
Each week I stand up and basically sell software to students (1600+ of them) like the Adobe Creative Suite and it does annoy me that Adobe do not at least give students free copies for the length of their study, it annoys me that we as a School have to pay a large amount to have Adobe installed and licensed for staff and student Macs.
I have come to expect this level of greed from Adobe and have had many frank conversations with the sales team that go no where fast. I was not expecting MacRabbit to behave in a similar way.
So should I be a little bit narked? Or am I being petty? It was only £24 to buy and it is such a great app but I would welcome any comments…