Cigraph Paranoia

[gpowless]

I spent part of my day trying to log on, download and update a number of Cigraph products. The "new Cigraph dongle will make it easier" they say.

I disagree. I see no need for such elaborate protection on an add-on for Archicad.

Is this really warranted? And how many people would steal the add-on if it was made available? Our USB ports are already overloaded and complicated protection systems for moderately useful products are a waste of resources and a waste of my time. I would rather see Cigraph put better quality into their products.

[stefan]

I never buy add-ons, actually.

I like the ArchiCAD dongle, actually, as it does not tie your license to a (dispensable) machine, but to you as a user. People nowadays switch between computers: desktop at work, laptop when travelling/meeting and another computer at home. And you can usually only license an application on a single machine.

I understand network licensing as an approach, but last time when a student of us was presenting his thesis, the department laptop did not have a suitable AutoCAD, so I moved my desktop, only to discover that the network connection in the presentation room did not work, so no license was there to load.

For ArchiCAD, I would prefer to be able to use the serialized educational version (not a network license) on all our class computers, but also to be able to plug in a dongle to turn it into my own license. But alas, this will not happen, as it would allow running a full office on student licenses and having only a single dongle when people need to print or export.

And imagine running ArchiCAD on a regular laptop with only two USB slots: one for ArchiCAD, one for the mouse. So where do you leave the Cigraph dongle, the external USB hard drive, the 3D Mouse and all other USB stuff people regularly need, such as iPod, USB sticks, digital camera etc... And since many of these devices need decent bus power, adding hubs is not always working out fine.

---

One dongle to rule them all: let people (optionally) add the Cigraph licenses on the ArchiCAD key and be done with it.

[gpowless]

Richard wrote:
It appears that Cigraph is charging 45 EUR ( $56 USD) for a new dongle. I never received the (supposedly free) one in the mail, so am I now required to buy one?

Paying for a dongle so that Cigraph will be protected, at least to me, is just another "nail in the coffin."

Ya. I hear you. It is like paying $50 for a t-shirt that advertises McDonalds or Wal-Mart on the front of it......

[Anonymous]

I bought ArchiStair and have only used it a little bit as I can't seem to get it to do what I want (simple balusters with newels at the top and bottom of each run and at each corner of a landing!). When I upgraded to AC 12 and found out ArchiStair wouldn't work, I contacted Cad Garage who I bought it from and they forwarded me to the Cigraph website for "the latest info".

I finally contacted Fabrizio and I appear on their records as having purchased it through Objects Online as apparently Cad Garage is a reseller for Objects Online.

All this is very confusing and apparently I will have to pay an "upgrade" so I can have another dongle. I guess I will get the dongle some time (soon I am told), but honestly I'm not sure I will buy the upgrade.

Don Lee

[Anonymous]

Well this was one of the most surprising forum-discussion I read in my life. Usually I don’t like to “disturb” users in their opinion exchanges but right now I feel like somebody who got into an airplane with the intention to fly to Acapulco but landed in Alaska inside the worst snowstorm.

------Dongle instead of previous serialization procedure:
2/3 of complains that we received in the last 10 years where on our protection system. People just hated it and tech-support passed half of their time explaining again and again what was already written step-by-step in the instructions. Something needed to be changed.

A couple of years ago we made a test and sold in selected countries plug-ins without any kind of protection. In 6 months the sales dropped by 95%!!! Well I doubt that what I felt at that time could be called PARANOIA. I learned quickly that plug-ins are considered as not important enough to buy them regularly when its planed to use them rarely. (There is going on something like “…OK, nice, useful, I will pay for it the next time I will need it..” The fact that this plug-in may just have saved somebody’s day doesn’t count.)

Next we started to test different protection systems but each had the same old problems: the protection was linked to only one computer. (There where some very nice solutions, but they didn’t work on the Mac or viceversa)

So HW protection came into discussion and first we asked Graphisoft if we could get some space inside their protection. No way! Then we searched for some kind of pass-through UBS port protection. I haven’t found anything. At the end there where 2 options left, a cheaper and easier one or the one used by Graphisoft. To avoid possible driver conflicts for customers we choose the more expensive one.

------Procedure:
For a small company like us to set up a system, which should charge in remote customer dongles, is like committing suicide in slow-motion. (Please don’t ask details, we repainted the walls)

Somebody wrote that it is stupid to use HW protection for a plug-in which may cost just 60€. Wrong, it is not stupid, but extremely stupid! But we have to protect somehow our 15 or more plug-ins.

So we decided to send out for free 1 (one) dongle to all registered customer who bought or updated at least 1 plug-in for ArchiCAD11. PLEASE NOTE, this independently if they intend to update to ArchiCAD12 compatibility or not!!! The investment for us is huge! But we hoped to show off in customer care. (If somebody doesn’t want to update our plug-ins to AC12, just trash the dongle).

------Steeling UBS slots from customers
Yes, true, correct. But as far as our customers are mostly Architects I had the romantic illusion that adding a nice medallion to the dongle will implicitly be understood as our apologies that we request you to dedicate a UBS port for us. Obviously I was wrong and therefore I do apologies for that now formally!

-----Compatibility updates
Graphisoft updates every 12 month their ArchiCAD and as far as Graphisoft is one of the technology leader in the world, their updates are not cosmetical but involve most of the time the whole datastructure. AND this means for us to rewrite every 12 months part of our code to stay tuned in with the latest version of ArchiCAD. For some plug-ins this is easy for others it can be a nightmare and occasionally requests a total rewriting of the whole program. We feel bad asking money for something where apparently we added nothing to the functionality of the plug-ins. But as far as the investment had to be done, we have to. And trust me, I really would prefer to use the time of our programmers for other things then rewrite every year the same application.

Unfortunately for us we have the tradition to make the compatibility updates also for plug-ins which where commercially a total flop. There is a plug-in where we have sold only I think about 50 units 4-5 years ago. But as far as those customers are happy and still use them we have to go on and code an update every year even for those plug-ins.

------Being criminal because of developing plug-ins
This is indeed a nice one☺ and I have to thank gpowless for giving me the opportunity to smile.

Dealing with ArchiCAD commercially is a niche business; trying to sell plug-ins for AC is niche power three. Nobody wants them really, Graphisoft and the distributors feel that our plug-ins point to missing functions in AC, and reading the latest posts here shows me that many customers feel even worst.

What makes things even more difficult is that most of our developed solutions soon will find their way into ArchiCAD by Graphisoft anyway, so our timerange to recover our investment is always very, very thin.

Getting back to the premise of this business: the relationship in this Graphisoft-Cigraph-Customer triangle is that there are still missing functions in ArchiCAD –> Cigraph discovers them and develops a possible solution in a plug-in -> those customers who need the specific solution NOW will buy them from Cigraph, those who can wait expect Graphisoft to bring probably a solution inside a later AC version.

In conclusion:
we do not sell by marketing but by the fact that there exist customers who need functions earlier and heard from other customers who where indeed very satisfied about our solutions. We don’t cheat in program descriptions and don’t want to create false expectations.

Therefore we have 3 requests to everybody:
1) PLEASE, DON’T buy our solutions before asking others! Maybe you don’t need it, maybe it is not good enough for you, maybe our company culture doesn’t fit to your expectations
2) DON'T expect that our plug-ins may save your live, there are just tools and can save at the best your day.
3) BUT if you use our products then please understand that our work has a value too, like everybody’s else work has. Our economical requests are modest.

Sorry for this long mail, but maybe some points needed to be clarified.

I wish everybody the very best luck for the future
Istvan Toth, CEO
Cigraph Srl
Cigraph Factory Srl

[gpowless]

"For a small company like us to set up a system, which should charge in remote customer dongles, is like committing suicide in slow-motion."

If you noticed the poll, as of this date 80% of the users here would not purchase or upgrade their products because of the dongle. Losing that much of the market share to me, is committing suicide at high speed.

I would suggest that you might want to reconsider your move. After all it isn't all about the programmers, now is it.......

[Anonymous]

gpowless wrote:
"For a small company like us to set up a system, which should charge in remote customer dongles, is like committing suicide in slow-motion."

If you noticed the poll, as of this date 80% of the users here would not purchase or upgrade their products because of the dongle. Losing that much of the market share to me, is committing suicide at high speed.

I would suggest that you might want to reconsider your move. After all it isn't all about the programmers, now is it.......

Well after all it is about being able to pay the programmers to do their work!

In any case if we do not have products which are useful enough to pass over this what you call limit, then we do not deserve to survive anyway and a fast dead is better for everybody (including us).

Have a wonderful day without thinking about Cigraph's problems
Istvan Toth

[gpowless]

Istvan wrote:

gpowless wrote:
"For a small company like us to set up a system, which should charge in remote customer dongles, is like committing suicide in slow-motion."

If you noticed the poll, as of this date 80% of the users here would not purchase or upgrade their products because of the dongle. Losing that much of the market share to me, is committing suicide at high speed.

I would suggest that you might want to reconsider your move. After all it isn't all about the programmers, now is it.......

Well after all it is about being able to pay the programmers to do their work!

In any case if we do not have products which are useful enough to pass over this what you call limit, then we do not deserve to survive anyway and a fast dead is better for everybody (including us).

Have a wonderful day without thinking about Cigraph's problems
Istvan Toth

Such arrogance is reason enough to switch products! If all you can offer is "...then we do not deserve to survive..." then maybe you should put a disclaimer on your site BEFORE people spend their money, that you really don't give a crap about your products or your customers. It should would save us all a lot of headache and give you your wish.

[Anonymous]

gpowless wrote:

Istvan wrote:

gpowless wrote:
"For a small company like us to set up a system, which should charge in remote customer dongles, is like committing suicide in slow-motion."

If you noticed the poll, as of this date 80% of the users here would not purchase or upgrade their products because of the dongle. Losing that much of the market share to me, is committing suicide at high speed.

I would suggest that you might want to reconsider your move. After all it isn't all about the programmers, now is it.......

Well after all it is about being able to pay the programmers to do their work!

In any case if we do not have products which are useful enough to pass over this what you call limit, then we do not deserve to survive anyway and a fast dead is better for everybody (including us).

Have a wonderful day without thinking about Cigraph's problems
Istvan Toth

Such arrogance is reason enough to switch products! If all you can offer is "...then we do not deserve to survive..." then maybe you should put a disclaimer on your site BEFORE people spend their money, that you really don't give a crap about your products or your customers. It should would save us all a lot of headache and give you your wish.

I'm very sorry, it didn't intend to be arrogant!!! But I see it as the crude true: if somebody is not able to give the quality into the products then this company should not survive.

I'm in this business since 25 years, so trust me that before I invested hundert-thousends of Euros in this new system and shipped thousands of dongles for free, I asked much more people then listed in your poll how they would feel about a HW-protection. There where many reasons why not to do it, but the majority indeed liked the idea to be able to move around with the protection instead of having the plug-in linked to just one computer (which in reality would mean to buy the plug-ins for all computers -what nobody ever did- or to have them missing always where you would just need it.)

I don't want to show off, but only today I got paid orders for about 150 dongles. I'm very sorry if there are people around who feel so bad about our dongles like you do, I'm really sorry! But as CEO I have to make my decisions and hope that our own poll showed more the average opinions then the one you started.

For other readers, again I apologies if my words seemed to be arrogant or disrespectful to our customers. It was not my intention.
Istvan Toth CEO
Cigraph Srl

[Brett Brown]

Istvan, I thank you for your side of the story on the Dongles. I don't think you have been arrogant or disrespectful.

On the other hand there is only one person on this thread that is arrogant and paranoid.

Unfortunately with the lack of every day useable features that AC provide, you and other add-on makers will be welcomed by most users, and they get the job done how we want. So it is our choice to invest in your add-ons if we need them. They are worth in time saving, far more than the good or bad opinions of changing to a Dongle. For example Archistair is still way ahead of the new AC stairs and Stairbuilder.

I also thank you for sending my free Dongle way out here. Hate to think how much it cost you.

[Anonymous]

I fully appreciate the need for software protection and in principle don't object to the dongle.

That being said, the update for AC 12 was VERY late and surprise, surprise after I load the update I discover I need a dongle. Cad Garage who I bought the software from knows nothing of this and I had to contact Cigraph directly and they finally informed me that I was in the system.

Yesterday, I got my dongle all the way from Italy via DHL with a very nice keychain attached. Apparently the dongle is valued a 45 euro for which I was not charged. So maybe I am hoping the update from AC11 to AC12
will be free. No such luck, I need to pay for an update that has, to my knowledge, no new features.

From Cigraph's website it is hard to determine how much or even how I go about purchasing this new security update. I'm sure it's there, but it is not so clear.

Bottom line, after a long delay and a lot of my time, I have to pay for a Cigraph security update.

And to my knowledge I still am not able to place newels at the bottom and top of each run and at the corners of the landings. PLEASE tell that I am wrong on this!!!!! Very common configuration here in the US.

Wow, sounds like a long rant. Again, I understand and sympathize with Cigraph's problems , I just needed make a few practical points from the end user's point of view.


Don Lee