Buy from i/us or Xara?

[gwpriester]

I know that a lot of us are bummed out to hear that EyeWire, who has purchased i/us only (as it appears) to eliminate some competition, and now are in a quandry as to purchase from i/us or Xara.

IMHO, i/us has been a terrific sponsor for the Xobe and has given me complete freedom to shape the community and design the site. They have fronted the cost of the site and my fee to maintain it for several years. This alone is a strong reason to show our support.

On a more practical (and selfish) note, if enough of us purchase Xara X from i/us, it might show the EyeWire bean counters that Xara is a viable product and one they should continue to market and promote. If we all decide to buy from Xara, the nearsighted EyeWire bean counters may decide Xara is a nothing product and drop it.

EyeWire has grown very big and very fast (they have the backing of their parent company Getty behind them which means the big bucks).

If EyeWire promotes and sells Xara X, Xara will have a major outlet where people can purchase Xara and Xara can grow the kind of installed user base numbers where the rest of the world will begin to take it seriously.

My recommendation is buy from i/us.

Gary
garypriester@earthlink.net

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Every So Humble...

[gwpriester]

I know that a lot of us are bummed out to hear that EyeWire, who has purchased i/us only (as it appears) to eliminate some competition, and now are in a quandry as to purchase from i/us or Xara.

IMHO, i/us has been a terrific sponsor for the Xobe and has given me complete freedom to shape the community and design the site. They have fronted the cost of the site and my fee to maintain it for several years. This alone is a strong reason to show our support.

On a more practical (and selfish) note, if enough of us purchase Xara X from i/us, it might show the EyeWire bean counters that Xara is a viable product and one they should continue to market and promote. If we all decide to buy from Xara, the nearsighted EyeWire bean counters may decide Xara is a nothing product and drop it.

EyeWire has grown very big and very fast (they have the backing of their parent company Getty behind them which means the big bucks).

If EyeWire promotes and sells Xara X, Xara will have a major outlet where people can purchase Xara and Xara can grow the kind of installed user base numbers where the rest of the world will begin to take it seriously.

My recommendation is buy from i/us.

Gary
garypriester@earthlink.net

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Every So Humble...

[geodd]

Buy from i/us. But first could a question be cleared up. At Xara.com they indicate the upgrade price from CorelXara to be $69.00 US. But they do not indicate if all versions 1.1, 1.5, 2.0 will be eligible for the upgrade price. Or is it only 2.0. Thanks !

[Wolfgang]

geod,

from what I remember (currently the new site is down again), they state the upgrade price for "Xara Studio and CorelXara" which apparently means ALL versions.
Because my first version was Xara Studio 0.99 then 1.0, 1.1 and so on. From 1.5, I guess, it turned to CorelXara.
So from my point of view, 69 is the thing !
(Dollars of course ;-))

Wolfgang

[Nathan Heagy]

If Eyewire's affiliation with Adobe gets in the way of their promotion of Xara, then buying Xara X from i-us would get us nothing. I'd prefer to buy from Xara, loose Eyewire support, but give Xara extra funding to take their promotion to different places.

With a guarantee from Eyewire it would be an easy choice. They could guarantee that enough sales will put Xara in their Eyewire publication (for example).

Otherwise it seems that Xara has just hired a PR firm in America and I'd like to support that decision.


Nathan Heagy
<HR>
Blow Your Beef Away
Cow Comics!

[KennyGardner]

Since Eyewire sells Illustrator for $399.00, it isn't likely that they are going to sell the $149.00 Xara (which is a much better program).

Kenny

[Mickie]

I will buy from i/us in gratitude for all the help I've recieved over the past 2+ years and in the hope that it might help keep the content and forum areas going in some way.

It seems as if the forums somehow have been a week or two ahead of my work demands. There was a discussion on icons and Seans BMP2ico and a week later one of our programers asked me to design an icon for him. A few weeks later a discussion on PDFs and I had a request for a PDF from some illustrations I designed in Xara.

Gary's tutorials have greatly improved my work and when I had a problem with Xara3D, Gary suggested I email Xara support. Two days later I got an email with the fix from Gary ... it took Xara Tech Support a week to reply to my problem.

I could probably go on and on with examples, but what it comes down to is I owe i/us and this community ... whether it lasts for 3 more months or years.

Of course if they do dump all the content areas and these forums, I'll never come back to the site! [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

Mickie

[bhealy27]

For the time being i-us has got my vote. I agree with an earlier comment that they've provided an absolutely wonderful site these last few years and one that I frequently checked to see what was happening in the Xara world. Gary's stuff has been extremely helpful to the Xara community and I think they deserve our loyalty and a bit of a thank you.

[Hein]

How much support are we likely to get from Eyewire after I-US ceases to be in it's current form, I'm more likely to buy from a retailer that's will still be around in a few months time even if it means paying $15 in taxes.

[chris-dickman]

Hein:

You'll be sent a CD from Xara automatically when purchasing from them or i/us. With CorelXARA, tech support was provided by Corel. With Xara X, it will be provided by Xara, no matter who you buy it from.


<blockquote>
<font color=green>Chris Dickman</font>
http://www.i-us.com/images/sig.gif
</blockquote>