As a company we hold 4 licenses for Pro-Engineer and have done for a few years now. We have become disillusioned with PTC over time, hated CREO and when CREO 2 came out (the bug fix for CREO 1) we decided that as PTC were not moving the product in the direction that we would like to see it we would drop our maintenance. This we have done, and now we hold what has become apparent, 4 useless licenses.
CREO, for all its hype was a step back, caused us a loss of productivity on some major projects and we felt very strongly that we needed to protest against this. We made it clear to PTC that we would be dropping our maintenance because we felt that we were not getting value for money. They seemed to care less. We did not take up the maintenance on our next renewel date and have managed o.k. for nearly a year without any problems. We mainly use Wildfire 4 for compatability reasons, most of our customer base use Wildfire 4 and some have even stayed with Wildfire 3.
However we have lately aquired a new customer who has been using CREO so we had to use it. The first thing that we encountered was a problem with custom BOM Baloons, which caused the program to crash. We were using CREO 2.0 F000, so I thought that it would be prudent to download the latest version and see if that particular bug had been fixed. I was not allowed as I was informed that I was not on active maintenance.
I e-mailed support and told them of the problem and asked if that had any suggestions to put it right and they did not even have the courtesy to reply.
Now I thought that if we had bought and paid for these licenses then I should be given support for the life of product, aparently not. I am not sure how legal that is as I have never known any other software house force you into paying for maintenance fixes when you have already purchased the product. This seems a little mean minded to me, I can understand and accept that the next version of CREO will not be available to us but as we have already paid for licenses for CREO 2.0 I would of thought that we would enjoy a certain level of support.
If the next version of CREO was to be a huge improvement over the current version, and god knows it need to be, then we may decide to opt back into the maintenance program but PTC are not making it easy for us to look upon it favourably.
The bottom line is that if you don't keep paying PTC your cash, then don't expect any help from them. Capitalism at is worst!
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