Help, Parallels does not want my money! But I want Parallels.

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persike

Member
Hi,

has anybody here had any experience with the guys at RegNow?

I ask because on the Parallels website one is referred to the RegNow division of Digital River for any questions relating to the purchase of Parallels Workstation. It may be true that their staff is "in the best position to help", as is stated on the Parallels website, but unfortunately they are not very responsive.

Over the last ten days I sent two inquiries via the RegNow webform but did not get any reply. Neither did anybody at Parallels write back when I contacted them by e-mail yesterday.

The matter is becoming increasingly urgent because my trial license has expired today. The problem is that I need some piece of information from RegNow about how my university can purchase a license of Parallels Workstation for me.

Any hint on what to do? THX, Malte.
 
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Maybe you should have asked any questions here. Maybe you should still ask your questions here. Maybe you should just go ahead and make the purchase.
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Oh, thanks a lot for the very helpful reply. If I understand your answer correctly you advise me to

a) ignore Parallels explicit statement that the RegNow team "is in the best position to help you if you're having a problem with an Parallels order." as can be read here.

b) post a quite special question in the forums about orders by german federal institutions which are not obliged to pay VAT

c) ignore the reality that as a german federal institution we cannot just purchase Parallels since we need a way of ordering that is not available within the common purchase options


Let me rethink the connection I made previously about your posting and helpful.
 
persike said:
Oh, thanks a lot for the very helpful reply. If I understand your answer correctly you advise me to

a) ignore Parallels explicit statement that the RegNow team "is in the best position to help you if you're having a problem with an Parallels order." as can be read here.

b) post a quite special question in the forums about orders by german federal institutions which are not obliged to pay VAT

c) ignore the reality that as a german federal institution we cannot just purchase Parallels since we need a way of ordering that is not available within the common purchase options


Let me rethink the connection I made previously about your posting and helpful.
Click to expand...

That (above) is not gonna help one bit...

His post was helpful: a) You should have asked questions here. What did you have to lose? b) You still can ask those questions here and perhaps you might get an answer. Never know until you try. c) Buy the damn software. At $79.95 US your request to save the VAT will be saving a very small sum. I realize it all adds up but if you are unable to get the questions answered you have two options:

1) Quit using Parallels
2) Buy the software
 
Dear Mr. Holbrook,

it is a mystery to me how people set their guidelines about what is appropriate to post in a forum and what is not. If I had posted my inquiry prior to contacting RegNow and/or the Parallels sales team, there would have been a high probabilty that some gentle forum member would have asked why I posted the problem in the forums before taking the measures that Parallels supposes me to take - which is contacting RegNow and/or the Parallels sales team. Thus, in a sense, I did RTFM before posting and now get examined for not consuming the time of forum members first. Seems like a lose-lose situation to me.


However, allow me to stress three points:

a) We are not talking about one single license for my private use but about the possibility of our whole department migrating to Mac OS and using Parallels. I am only the first staff member to test the efficacy and usability of the Mac+Windows solution.

b) That said, as an institutional customer we demand timely support, especially when it comes to spending money on software. We are in no way willing to resort to user forums when problems with the software or its support surface. As an institution we need our questions or problems to be relianty answered by vendor representatives. There is no way I could tell the head of our office that an anonymous user XY guessed a solution instead of presenting him with a decided answer issued and authorized by a Parallels team member.
The fact that Parallels and RegNow are unresponsive even during the buying stage does not increase our confidence in their support quality once we have purchased the software.

c) You misunderstood my inquiry. We do not request that VAT is excluded. Instead, exclusion of VAT is a conditio sine qua non since as a german federal institution we are not allowed to pay VAT. The finance office at our university will simply refuse to pay any sum including VAT.
Hence, our current problem is precisely defined. We need an invoice containing a license of Parallels Desktop for Mac without VAT included in the total order sum. I do not think that any forum member can provide us with that. Nor will any forum member be able to give other advice than to contact Parallels and/or RegNow - which is what we did already, multiple times.
The posting was our last measure to gain attention of Parallels staff members in order to proceed with purchasing their product.

Make no mistake. We really appreciate the work Parallels is doing. They have a marvelous product and are currently the only firm worldwide that can provide a VM solution for Intel-based Macs. This is a great effort and cannot be cherished enough. We are also aware of the fact that as a smal to mid-size enterprise Parallels has its hands full with developing software, supporting users, fixing bugs and so forth. We are sure that they do all they can to keep up with the current demands. However, we would nonetheless expect at least a single reply to multiple inquiries over ten or more days.

In the meantime, I received a mail from RegNow and things seem to develop in the right direction. Thank you for taking the time to read and answer this thread.

Regards.
 
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jerks

As the title implies, there are many jerks on this forum who are here only to vent.

Do not judge parallels by these "people".

I agree that some form of acknoledgment should have been sent to you.

I am glad you are getting the problem solved!

don
 
Thanks a lot for your support. I was completely run over by the first two answers I got since they did not reflect the friendly and helpful climate here in the forums.

To say the least, I really love the Parallels solution and our department would never have even thought about migrating to Macs if Parallels wasn't available. But with the trial license running out and no word from anybody during ten working days I got a little worried how to maintain my pressing Windows projects. Above that I feared that I had to tell the head of our office that the Parallels solution is not an option due to support issues - despite the great technical quality of their software.

Bye, Malte.
 
dglock2 - I have made 60 posts that were all positive and oriented towards helping others on this forum.

In my 61st post I don't believe I was AT ALL disrepectful and maybe I should have elminated the word DAMNED. But Persike in NO WAY eluded to the fact that he was talking about 100s of copies of these things. He sounded very much to me like someone too cheap to pay the $79.95 (not counting the rebate) for an amazing product.

His first post stated that his trial license was expiring and that he needed info on how his university could purchase for him. Never once did he state ANYTHING about VAT or anything else. He sounded to me like a University cheapskate like many I've known over the years that haggle a small company down in price with the promise of buying 1000's of copies just to get that slightly better price and end up purchasing one copy.

My opinion was slightly furthered but then changed in his initial reply where he attempted to clarify his position but his first statement about about how "very" helpful the reply was rubbed me the wrong way. He just came across as a jerk himself as if all of us SHOULD HAVE KNOWN that he was respresenting a German university and that he could not purchase direct due to VAT etc etc... Frankly he didn't give us enough information.

My post simply states his options. I was generally polite about it except for the advice to purchase the damned software. I regret using that word but frankly if people are gonna haggle about the price of Parallels I will be seriously pissed. It is one of the best value per dollar products out there.

His reply hence is the ONLY place where he started to provide the big picture about how many copies he wanted and the fact that VAT could not be included. He also stated that NO FORUM MEMBER COULD PROVIDE THIS INFORMATION. How in the hell does he know that? How does he know that this forum is NOT visited by people that work within REGNOW? He posted a question here looking for help then says no one here can provide the answer? Hum...

Regardless his entire way of posting the question just made things worse. If he had been clearer about his needs and requirements he would have gotten better answers.

In 20+ years of posing on BBSs and Forums I've learned that you must be clear in what you post. If Persike had changed his post to include the fact that he needed to get clarifaction on VAT and the fact that his university (from Germany) could not pay VAT etc etc... I think both the original reply and myself would out bowed out simply because we could not answer his question.

In short a vague question often begets a vague answer and that is EXACTLY what he got.

I take exception that he and yourself consider the first to answers to lack the friendly nature of this forum. Frankly Persike you got the ball rolling with your carefully worded reply of:

"Oh, thanks a lot for the very helpful reply. If I understand your answer correctly you advise me..."

If you are as important at the university as you seem to be I would have expected more understanding. Constant simply suggested asking the question here. As did I. Both of us suggested purchasing the software. Me slightly more emphatically than he did.

It was not until much later that you illuminated us all to the reason for your question in the first place. Had you done that in your initial post of this would have never occurred.

I have sometimes found the answer to my question in the least likely of places. So in the future I suggest you do not assume that no one on the forum can answer it. Or if you must assume that then why post in the first place?

Mark
 
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Persike,

To respond directly to you:

persike said:
Dear Mr. Holbrook,

it is a mystery to me how people set their guidelines about what is appropriate to post in a forum and what is not. If I had posted my inquiry prior to contacting RegNow and/or the Parallels sales team, there would have been a high probabilty that some gentle forum member would have asked why I posted the problem in the forums before taking the measures that Parallels supposes me to take - which is contacting RegNow and/or the Parallels sales team. Thus, in a sense, I did RTFM before posting and now get examined for not consuming the time of forum members first. Seems like a lose-lose situation to me.
Click to expand...

I merely agreed with the first reply that you had nothing to lose by asking the question here. As I said in my post above it would have been MUCH MUCH more helpful if you had let us know what the general problem was. I have NO experience with VAT and German Universities. I would have simply steered clear of the post.

As a University educator I would have expected you to believe in the idium that there is no such thing as a stupid question. Ask the question. If no one knows the answer you will not get one. You have lost nothing but the time it took to post it.


persike said:
However, allow me to stress three points:

a) We are not talking about one single license for my private use but about the possibility of our whole department migrating to Mac OS and using Parallels. I am only the first staff member to test the efficacy and usability of the Mac+Windows solution.
Click to expand...

Fine... Great. I think the more sales Parallels gets the better off we all will be. But let people know that when you post your question. IE say something like:

Hi, I've tried contacting RegNow and get no response. What I need to know is:

I'm representing a university that may by many copies of parallels if we can get past the following purchase issues. I'm wondering if any of you have met with these issues before or can give me another route to contact either parallels or RegNow.

My issues are:

VAT...
Support...
etc...

If you had simply said something to that point we would all still be great friends. But alas we are now defending our shores.

persike said:
b) That said, as an institutional customer we demand timely support, especially when it comes to spending money on software. We are in no way willing to resort to user forums when problems with the software or its support surface. As an institution we need our questions or problems to be relianty answered by vendor representatives. There is no way I could tell the head of our office that an anonymous user XY guessed a solution instead of presenting him with a decided answer issued and authorized by a Parallels team member.
The fact that Parallels and RegNow are unresponsive even during the buying stage does not increase our confidence in their support quality once we have purchased the software.
Click to expand...

I hear you there. There is no doubt that Parallels support is lacking these days but simply but WHAT OTHER OPTION IS THERE if you want to run Mac OS and WinXP?

I hope you can get this resolved but it seems to me like Parallels is a company that is very small and probably will not be able to dedicate a representitive for support as you request.

I work in biomedical device software and we face the same issue. The FDA must have everything documented and controlled. We cannot use "shareware" and other tools they must have gone through validation. But I have found a way around that by proving that code I compile under Parallels passes a 32 bit CRC against code compiled under standard Windows XP. With that I am able to use it for my development process.

persike said:
c) You misunderstood my inquiry. We do not request that VAT is excluded. Instead, exclusion of VAT is a conditio sine qua non since as a german federal institution we are not allowed to pay VAT. The finance office at our university will simply refuse to pay any sum including VAT.
Hence, our current problem is precisely defined. We need an invoice containing a license of Parallels Desktop for Mac without VAT included in the total order sum. I do not think that any forum member can provide us with that. Nor will any forum member be able to give other advice than to contact Parallels and/or RegNow - which is what we did already, multiple times.
The posting was our last measure to gain attention of Parallels staff members in order to proceed with purchasing their product.
Click to expand...

Yes I did completely and the reason was that NONE of this information was available in the original post. I also felt your reply to constant was undeserving. His suggests were neither negative nor bad. Simply put: Ask the question. Buy the software. He never did anything to degrade you in any way. Had you been clearer about your VAT requirements and support issues then he probably would not have posted a reply at all.

persike said:
Make no mistake. We really appreciate the work Parallels is doing. They have a marvelous product and are currently the only firm worldwide that can provide a VM solution for Intel-based Macs. This is a great effort and cannot be cherished enough. We are also aware of the fact that as a smal to mid-size enterprise Parallels has its hands full with developing software, supporting users, fixing bugs and so forth. We are sure that they do all they can to keep up with the current demands. However, we would nonetheless expect at least a single reply to multiple inquiries over ten or more days.

In the meantime, I received a mail from RegNow and things seem to develop in the right direction. Thank you for taking the time to read and answer this thread.
Regards.
Click to expand...

As do I and I have tried to be positive and add to the Parallels experience. I will take this opportunity to apologize to you here and now if you felt my post was negative. I hope you can see through my explainations why I felt as I did.

I too would love to see Parallels and RegNow responding but alas that is the way internet companies do business these days in a large majority. They simply have no physical presence which creates problems for many of us.

Good luck

Mark
 
Your apology is very much appreciated, hopefully as much as mine will be. Your posting clarified your perspective and made me aware of the fact that my initial question did not detail into the motivation for my posting enough. Not mentioning the VAT issue admittedly was not the wisest choice to make regarding my initial posting. The reason for this leap of thinking is threefold. First, it's common sense in Germany that federal institutions do not have to pay VAT when purchasing so-called "special items" from foreign vendors. Second, I was in quite a rash because of my Parallels Desktop ceasing to work due to license timeout. I thought that ten working days should have been enough to put an order through to Parallels. And finally, in that state of mind I had planned to address the posting solely to the Parallels staff members who read this forum. The title of my posting ought to have been different to make that clearer.

And for an additional comment before this whole thread should receive no further attendance: My second posting took on that harsh tone because I felt being disrespected by Constant. The repetitive use of "maybe... maybe... maybe" is very reminiscent of how you talk to somebody who made a stupid mistake for stupid reasons with stupid consequences. None of the three hold for my inquiry. All I asked in my first posting was whether anybody could give some advice on how to contact RegNow/Parallels because my attempts had been unsuccessful. I do not believe that one should bother forum members with issues for which a straightforward path of action is already laid out. And contacting the sales team is such an issue. It's addressed in a FAQ, the FAQ directs the reader to RegNow and provides an e-mail address to do so. Why then post into the forums? I strongly believe that my order of actions was in correct succession. The way in which Constant suggested to have opened a new forum thread in the first place is ill-behaved since it boils down to bashing me for having read and followed the FAQ. This was not acceptable to me.
The motivation for the second of Constant's three pieces of advice was equally questionable from my point of view. Being told to post on the forums when that is precisely what I did shortly before took on the semblance of useless information as far as my evaluation went.
Furthermore, Constant's call to "make the purchase" was pointless because this is exactly what I wanted to do. Maybe my English is not refined enough to get a subtle message inherent in Constant's words but recommend somebody to do A when the problem is not if but how to accomplish A appears not exactly helpful to me. And this impression is what I voiced in the first and last part of my second posting. In hindsight, I realize that adopting the same degrading writing style that Constant had used before was unfortunate. However, in summa I'd say that not I but Constant disregarded the idium that there is no such thing as a stupid question.

Finally, allow me as a none-native speaker to ask one thing about english semantics. You state that my third posting marks the first time that I mentioned the fact that as a german university we could not pay VAT. Does a significant difference exist between your use of "could not" and "cannot". The latter is the word I used in my second posting to explain why VAT needed to be excluded from the total order sum. To all of my (school) knowledge "cannot" describes a situation where the said possibility does not exist. Exactly that is the case with german federal institutions and charging for VAT.

Be that as it may be. Let's assume that all sides did not behave perfectly gentleman-like in this matter and close the subject.

Kind regards, Malte.
 
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Presented as an ordinary single purchase and given that there are a good number of people who frequent these forums whom are more than willing to help, one could well expect to find one's answer right here. And presented as an ordinary single purchase, forking out the most resonable asking price is a very realistic proposition, even with questions going unanswered.

If the purchase senario is much different, then the answer would need to be much different. But only if presented as being much different from an ordinary single purchase.
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@Constant: It must be my not being a native speaker that always leaves me perplexed with what you're trying to convey. In none of my above postings I mentioned the price of Parallels Desktop or that I don't find it adequate for the software. It's completely irrelevant to me if my university is charged 49,99, 79,99, or even 499,99. I need Parallels to accomplish the work my university expects me to do and in turn I expect my university to provide me with a copy of Parallels. At whatever costs.
But the price of Parallels was at no time topic of this thread. Only my hazzles with contacting the Parallels/RegNow sales team and later the VAT issue were brought up by me. So why are you suddenly referring to the price of Parallels? Actually, the fact that we did not already buy Parallels was because I wanted to wait until after the rebate period. $ 30 is virtually nothing for my university, nor would $300 be for a dozen licenses, but it may be something for somebody at Parallels. And if not, it's just a fair gesture.
 
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When you say "how my university can purchase a license of Parallels Workstation for me", it seems very much like you only want to purchase a single license. I wondered why any question you may have to ask of RegNow would be worth worring about given the extremely reasonable price of Parallels. Hence the just buy it even if you have unanswered quetions proposition.

If it had been indicated that you wanted to do something very different from an ordinary single license purchase, then my initial reply would have also been very different.
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