New Iomega line sexy as hello... What up Netgear???

AMRivlin wrote:

mdgm, while I agree with many of your points (and I respect your vast contribution here) what I think what Intergr8d is saying is: (reading between the lines) "look it is 2012, while most can be done from the command line, Netgear is losing traction with the prosumer who likes modern guis and enhanced widgets/apps. If you are correct that they are working on it... Intergr8d is just saying, look all the competition has leaked/released/beta'd something for enthusiasts, and for engadget/slashgear/pcworld to oogle over, and Netgear at a very least should share with us (their most loyal customers) as a sign of good will.

NetGear has already released the new Duo v2 and NV+ v2 with a new UI. NetGear has some add-ons available for the ReadyNAS and there is a large range of community add-ons available. A modern GUI would be nice but it'll take time. Whenever they're asked about this yoh-dah etc. say that there's no ETA for a new UI for x86. These things take time and it's difficult to estimate how long it will take.

AMRivlin wrote:
SO what if they let some cats out of the bag on new hardware, interface, apps, or all of the above.

If they do then it gives time for competitors to copy them and nullify any advantage they may gain from what they release. If they announce stuff well before it's ready the first question people would ask would be when will it be released. They could set a date only to find issues they encounter lead to delays leaving customers disappointed. There's also the impact on sales of current products if they announce new products. If they won't tell me what their product roadmap is I wouldn't expect them to share it with the user base.

AMRivlin wrote:
Competitors are already light years ahead in terms of that, and aren't going to copy new functionality overnight.

Some of them add functionality pretty quickly, but it wouldn't be overnight. It's one thing to add functionality it's quite another to maintain it. Add a feature and you have to maintain that feature, consider what updates are needed to it over time. There's a lot of work and development costs associated with various additions.

AMRivlin wrote:
And if they do, so what again (thunderbolt, quadcore, insert new feature here, are all common knowledge anyway) ReadyNAS team at Netgear can advertise that they are a leader, not a follower.

NetGear's a leader in terms of hardware quality and providing local support. That doesn't mean they need to be the first to run new hardware out the door.

AMRivlin wrote:
On the same point, readynas.com is looking tired, and could use some fun posts, and a cleanup of old apps and articles.

I agree that readynas.com could do with a lot of work.

AMRivlin wrote:
And if the entire team is flatout coding/quality controlling/tech-supporting, hire 3 summer web/pr/twitter interns or 1 full time guy, but do something."

Tech support is not the job of the NetGear developers. Whilst they may do some, the tech support is mostly handled by the separate support team.

yoh-dah and chirpa are on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/yohdah, http://www.twitter.com/chirpah, chirpa runs a ReadyNAS FaceBook fan page: http://www.readynas.com/facebook and yoh-dah is on Google+: https://plus.google.com/107689211378624727495/posts

AMRivlin wrote:
mdgm: Side note, Lion and RN Remote didnt work until March this year.

Lion with 32-bit kernel (yes 64-bit apps work on this) worked for me as soon as it was released. It was only Macs running the 64-bit kernel on Snow Leopard and Lion that Remote wasn't working on.

AMRivlin wrote:
anyone else: I constantly see comments about apps and bells and whistles being unnecessary, well then look at RIMM, they make calls and are secure, but everyone is going with iphone/android, because they are more than functionality. design+function+stability is important, hopefully Netgear reacknowledges this moving forward.

There are plenty of community add-ons available to extend functionality of the ReadyNAS beyond the core functionality offered in the firmware. The new ARM products already have a new UI and perhaps we'll see something similar come to x86.