I kinda see where he was coming from (piracy is everywhere in China), but that always bothered me, too, and i don't think it was the most effective way to go about it. You maybe didn't have people copying/pasting making their own courses, but i doubt it did anything to stop spreading the content online. The books have been updated and now allow searching and have a nice outline/bookmark system set up to make going through the PDF really easy, so that's not really so much an issue anymore.mouse wrote:I don’t like to be negative, but ever since Mike refused to make the text of their pdfs searchable due to fears of piracy, I’ve had the feeling that the company is not responsive to the needs of the consumer. The new pricing scheme and lack of beta testing I think stems from this attitude.
The customer service for me was always fine, i've gotten in touch with them a few times with comments, questions, reporting mistakes, etc. and they've always responded, generally very quickly. It took a while to hear back from them once or twice when they were really busy and sometimes Mike didn't sound super excited about hearing criticisms/suggestions, but they always took their time to answer in detail. And when folks were upset about the Taiwanese Mandarin course, they eventually re-translated and re-recorded all the sentences and offered it to us free of charge. So i have no complaints in that regard.
The pricing is high and in my opinion currently not worth it (unless you are going to be studying 50 sentences a day), i don't know if it will ever get to a point where it's worth $30/month, but eventually i'd say $20/month would be an ok price. I've seen improvements as i've used it over the past week and a half or so and it is more stable. I still think this first month should've been free, but i'm ok with just supporting the project for now.