Altium Circuit Studio Development???

Was doing my weekly poke-around the discussion forums as I yell and curse Altium for not providing a way to automatically generate *useable* pick and place files in CS...

Got a computer generated form email from the local Altium sales office about there special du jour on AD,  though in this case it had a from address from an actual person (well I assume there's an actual person at the address) in the local sales office.

So I figure what the heck, I sent a short reply saying that while I'm an Altium CUSTOMER (at least in that I gave them money, Altium clearly doesn't see that as a threshold for being a customer) AD's feature set and price don't fit with current needs, but maybe some day down the road, etc.  I also mentioned the experience with CS has started to turn me off to considering Altium as a viable company for future CAD tools.

I guess I expected at least a quick email back with at least a "thanks for letting me know"  - I certainly wasn't expecting a lowly sales person trying to make this month's quota to solve Altium's abandonment of CS customers.  But alas, just like this thread, I got nothing back...except a few days later another automated email "reminding me" of Altium's wonderfulness.  err, NO.

Gone from shooting themselves in the foot to shooting up the rest of their body parts...

<shrug>

(ok, I really just wanted to bubble this thread up to the top again)

Was doing my weekly poke-around the discussion forums as I yell and curse Altium for not providing a way to automatically generate *useable* pick and place files in CS...

Got a computer generated form email from the local Altium sales office about there special du jour on AD,  though in this case it had a from address from an actual person (well I assume there's an actual person at the address) in the local sales office.

So I figure what the heck, I sent a short reply saying that while I'm an Altium CUSTOMER (at least in that I gave them money, Altium clearly doesn't see that as a threshold for being a customer) AD's feature set and price don't fit with current needs, but maybe some day down the road, etc.  I also mentioned the experience with CS has started to turn me off to considering Altium as a viable company for future CAD tools.

I guess I expected at least a quick email back with at least a "thanks for letting me know"  - I certainly wasn't expecting a lowly sales person trying to make this month's quota to solve Altium's abandonment of CS customers.  But alas, just like this thread, I got nothing back...except a few days later another automated email "reminding me" of Altium's wonderfulness.  err, NO.

Gone from shooting themselves in the foot to shooting up the rest of their body parts...

<shrug>

(ok, I really just wanted to bubble this thread up to the top again)

That's funny I had the same experience last month, was asked if I'd like to attend a local AD roadshow - I asked is there would be anything related to CS at the roadshow and got a reply saying "unfortunately not this time around". Struck up a short conversation with the sales person who was very pleasant - until I asked about CS road map... Silence, no reply. That's pretty crappy Altium are currently very successfully upsetting and frustrating a lot of small business and start-ups which are potential future AD buyers. I'm about to renew my CS license, though that seems like it will be a waste of money at this point - maybe putting some money in will help get some information out...

Curious, engineereddownunder what you did about renewal of license if you do not mind saying.

I haven't renewed just yet, though I've got the license renewal in my element14 cart, have just tried one last ditch effort to get some feedback from element14 or Altium on what their plans are with the product. I think software support is necessary but would be pretty annoyed if I pay the $200 odd and find there are no further updates.

I'm wondering if the release of CS (and also CircuitMaker) in conjunction with Element14 was in reaction to Mentor Designer (and later Maker-Pro release) with Digikey in 2014.  See https://www.edn.com/electronics-products/other/4437730/Mentor-meets-Digikey--low-cost-CAD-results

That is to say, it was less of an effort to compete with Eagle, KiCAD and such.  Since that effort by Mentor seems to have underwhelmed the market maybe Altium has decided to put less attention on CS.

It isn't surprising that discussions with Altium sales people about CS gets the ghost treatment.  They have no financial stake.

tarribred61  wrote:

It isn't surprising that discussions with Altium sales people about CS gets the ghost treatment.  They have no financial stake.

Sales people I agree on, but IMHO Altium as a company might hurt longer term prospects for conversion of CS customers in to full AD seats, either because us "small" businesses grow or we end up somewhere influencing CAD decisions (though in all honesty having neen though it previously the latter is such a complex issue that is many times dominated by what was used in the past and the hit from training/learning a new tool).  Or Eagle comes out with a AD importer that does a reasonable job and we all decide to take the pain now rather than putting more designs in to a dead tool.

I don't want to jump ship; the features CS has work well enough for now. Though it crashes frequently I have not lost any work because of that; just time lost to watching the crash progress bar inch across the screen.

Lack of (useful) support for basic things like panels, pick and place, design variants, and library/part revision control are wearing on me. I assume that other packages my solve those issues they probably have some other problem(s) that would be equally annoying.

Assuming (parts of?) the same code base is powering AD and CS the crashes to bother me - is AD that flaky too?  No effort to fix the crashes. Software QA is tough, but it can't be ignored if you're making products that businesses rely on.

My annual renewal comes up in Jan. I can't see paying that under current circumstances. OTOH if Altium provided some concrete plans/deliverables schedule I would have no issue at all renewing.