Is DNASTAR in trouble?

[Dirk Müller]

Are there really any differences between 5.x and 6.0? I had the
impression that they simply exchanged the mapdraw program name and
designed the program windows in a new fashioned way. Still no export
funcions for other graphic formats or for ms office. My colleague now
use Bioedit (for free)...
Dirk...
On 28 Feb 2005 13:34:43 -0000, mathog at caltech.edu (David Mathog)
wrote:

>Jacquelyn Sampson wrote:
>> I recently upgraded to the latest version of DNASTAR.  It is terrible.
> > It reminds me of their early releases.  The only difference is that 
>this time,
> > the company doesn't seem interested in fixing the problems.  All of the
> > people that I have been dealing with for years have left the company 
>recently
> > and the service, which was once very good, is nonexistent.  I was 
>going thinking
> > about buying more software from them, but I don't want to invest more 
>money
> > in them if they are going out of business.  Does anyone know what is 
>going on at DNASTAR?
>
>The advent of 6.0 was pretty rocky from our point of view too.  For 5.x 
>we had been using 4 license servers for Sassafras (1 master, 3 shadows).
>That was enough redundancy that even with various outages we never lost
>all servers at once. For 6.0 DNASTAR changed license managers
>and then was unable to deliver a license for the new one that 
>implemented a similar level of failover support.  They did
>deliver a "test" license that ran on one server only.  That
>was at least enough to let me test installing 6.0 and have a couple of 
>beta testers try it, but it wasn't safe enough to roll out 6.0 
>throughout the department.  Other than the license manager change I 
>didn't find 6.0 to be all that different from 5.x.  The biggest change 
>was the addition of Seqbuilder, which is a sort
>of Gene Construction Kit like application (in rough terms).  On the 
>other hand, I did not spend hours and hours
>running through the different applications, so cannot say anything 
>meaningful about the relative number of bugs in the two releases.
>The beta testers who are using 6.0 have not reported any
>problems to me.
>
>We were essentially forced to upgrade to 6.0 because
>DNASTAR told us that future "support" on the 5.x series was going to be 
>limited to fixing problems caused by OS upgrades.  In other words 
>support on 5.x was going to be a lot of money for very little in return.
>We reported one bug in the 5.x OSX version in the last 3 months and 
>support said to upgrade to 6.0.  Which of course we couldn't do
>because of the license manager issues.
>
>Bottom line, I too have the impression that they are going through a 
>rough patch. I also get the feeling that DNASTAR is a bit short handed 
>currently, at least at the developer level.  Oddly, from my point of 
>view, their "careers" page:
>
>   http://www.dnastar.com/web/r31.php
>
>doesn't indicate that they are looking for developers, or at least
>not through that channel.  However, they are looking for a
>"Manager of Quality Assurance".  Draw your own conclusions on
>that.
>
>Wish I had more info to share but that's all I know.
>
>Regards,
>
>David Mathog
>mathog at caltech.edu
>Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
>---