From: E Doc <doc6502_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2002 10:31:18 -0800 (PST)

--- Stuart Tedford <stuart.tedford_at_piresearch.co.uk> wrote:
> Archos have nothing to loose and everything to gain by shipping with
> RockBox. They will get more customers for their (dare I say obsolete)
> player product, and any customer support will be convieniently re-directed
> to RockBox. Maybe now the Archos customer support will actually reply to
> customer queries (with an automated response saying to contact Bjorn :-).

As nice as this sounds, I really hope that Bjorn doesn't get innundated with
lots of e-mails. The traffic on this list is already fairly substantial-- he
must spend a lot of time just keeping up with the normal list traffic!

> All RockBox gets out of it is advertising I guess, but at the cost of more
> "customer support". Is it worth it?

Well, depends on what you mean by "worth". It's worth it inasmuch as it will
allow Rockbox to become much more widely accepted, and allow it to grow with a
broader user base in mind. You are correct, though --this does put the
quality/feature onus on the Rockbox community, though.

Since Rockbox has overall a better feature set than the current Archos OS, the
users will certainly win.

Archos also may have a long-term strategy in mind. It's expensive doing R&D
for different OS-es for several products. Been there, done that. If Rockbox
gains widespread user acceptance, then Archos may put their own OS development
efforts into "fix bugs only" mode.

The question was raised a little while ago if there are any Archosians on the
list-- with Rockbox being bundled with new shipments, a reliable and
knowledgeable contact "on the inside" becomes even more important.

By the way, I love this "old school" hacking that's been done. Nice to see
that people are still rolling up their sleeves and learning-- sometimes just
for the fun of it.

Just my two penneth. Thanks for listening.

-Doc

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Received on 2002-12-11