Best Regard,
Pietro

I am happy to hear that some of your top managers are Mac users. They indeed will be able to understand better the problem. Maybe we could invite them to the forum so we can hear what they has to say . Seriously, I think-feel that as a first simple patch you should place is to have someone devote enough attention to the forum to avoid misunderstanding from appearing. It should be a mac user, and should answer to queries immediately, within 24-hours. It just should not be allowed for the situation to drain itself to the point where we feel left to ourselves, speaking bad about mindjet… in your own house. Who was responsible for letting the situation in your official forum reach this state?
By the way, I am sure we agree this should never be done by deleting anything. I don’t know much about the deleted material, except what I read on that thread. It was not my post that was deleted, and I understand that it was a post, and not a whole account. But I might be wrong. If you want to follow up on this, you need to contact the original author of that comment.

Yes, I fully agree that the naming might have something to do with the situation you describe, but honestly I think the quality of this mindjet product is way too low, at this stage, to put the blame only on the name. My feeling is that such a product should have been called pre-alpha, and given for free (ok, 10$). Really, I know nothing of mindmanager 7 or 8. I am a mindmanager 2002 user, and the product was a let down for me.

The only thing I remember that I thought was neat, and only your product provided it (we don’t consider here conceptmaps as mindmaps), is the possibility to put a label to a link between branch. I thought if I should have kept the product just for that, and decided that it was not worth the hassle.

I know developing things for different platforms is a hassle, especially if you want to use the special programming shortcuts that are unique for each platform. I use to program in Windows Visual C++. Now I program in Python. Maybe you might need to consider that the age of a single platform domination is over, and you have grown beyond that, and prepare a program in a (non java!!) base that supports different platforms. In fact I think I will make this my official proposal:

Don’t try to catch up, instead prepare a new product, and make the new product in a platform neutral language. And then release it on all platforms at the same time. Use all the experience you have acquired so far, and put it all in this new product, making it better than the windows version.

Michael, one last thing, is my suspect right? Do you guys own the patent on having “a direct link in an html mindmap”? Patents are public, so I think you can tell me, but it is a bit of a hassle for me to look directly. If you are, can you find an agreement with other mindmanager houses? I’ll make this an ethical request: we need this.

If you’d like to contact me directly, I’d be more than happy to discuss this further.

Thanks. I think for now we should keep this public, as other people are probably curious too.

Regards,
Pietro

First, thanks for your Twitter reply.

It’s unfortunate that it has come to this and Mindjet is indeed to blame for some of your frustration. Mindjet could have been more proactive or clearer in our forums and communications.

Here’s a little background regarding your post:
MindManager for Windows has had over 15 years of development put into it while the Mac version was first released in 2006. In mid-2007 we released the second version of MindManager Mac. At the time of release, as you stated, MindManager Mac did not offer the same functionality as MindManager 7. That is one of the reasons why the Mac product is priced significantly lower than MindManager 8.

We also probably set unrealistic expectation for users like yourself (people who used MindManager on Windows and moved to Mac) when we called our second Mac release MindManager 7 Mac. This implied functional parity with our Windows product which was an unintended consequence of that naming decision.
We’ve received many compliments from the Mac community on MindManager 7 Mac. It offers a nice general mapping experience and has been praised by many users new to mapping. More advanced and ex-Windows users have been requesting enhancements to bring it up to the same level as MindManager 7 and 8.

As a small but growing software company, we’ve had to make some tough development choices based on our resources, available technologies, the economy, etc… However, our organization is continuing to support and grow our Mac offering. The recent surge of growth in the Mac platform is exciting and has not gone unnoticed at Mindjet. In fact, our CEO, VP of Products and head of product management all use the Mac so they’re likely to understand your concerns firsthand. Again, I’m happy to share that we’ll continue to support and develop upgrades to our Mac release and welcome your input and concerns.

Regarding the deleted account in our forum, I do not have visibility into the details about this yet but will personally follow-up with our customer support team about this raised issue.

If you’d like to contact me directly, I’d be more than happy to discuss this further.

Thanks again, Michael

I actually expanded further on this tweet to argue why I was disappointed that the focus of many tweets regarding Mumbai was to congratulate social media and Twitter for being faster on the uptake than traditional media.

I go on to expand on this in a discussion with Twitter user gyokusai where I say “#mumbai is a media experiment while mumbai is the city under attack that Twitter half the time forgets is bleeding”. That is – the Mumbai experience on Twitter is half genuine citizen journalism in action, and half self-congratulatory social media participants just happy to see a lot of publicity for Twitter regardless of the actual situation on the ground.

It is precisely that mix of content which was disturbing me at the time. Unfortunately that is also the reality of citizen journalism, the Twitter experience, social media – the whole online experience of no quality control or central control over the message to be delivered. I still believe Twitter is a crucial tool for circulating information, from, among and to the people who are in that moment and hoping for a happy ending. But I was and still am upset that users are more interested in what the Mumbai horror meant for Twitter, than what it meant for humanity. Unfortunately, for all the Twitter fanatics may like to argue, the two are NOT identical!
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