Can I trust Plastic SCM?

Question

I finally clicked on one of Stack Overflow's frequent sidebar advertisements for Plastic SCM, and was somewhat perturbed to discover a number of strange errors in grammar, spelling, and consistency on the resulting web site. The most prominent of these are arbitrarily capitalized words, inconsistent use of punctuation for items that are formatted like bullet points, apparent typographical errors, and unhyphenated compound adjectives. Should I trust a company with such a web site to produce software that is internally consistent and reliable? And in general, does the impression a web site gives influence others' decision to try or use a product?

If anyone has used this product, please share your opinions and reviews.

Answer 1

It definitely can influence a decision, but keep in mind the person doing the website might be a different caliber than the developers. I know the developer of CI Factory has awful spelling, but CI Factory is still pretty good.

Answer 2

It really depends, have you considered that they may not be native english speakers, and that grammar and spelling can more difficult than programming?

Answer 3

Although the people editing a website for a product/company may be of a different calibre, poor grammar shows a business to have poor quality management processes. If a business does not even have processes to ensure the quality of its own simple "face" (website), how can one expect it to have adequate quality management processes of the complex product it makes?

Answer 4

It's a spanish company, so this might explain why there are some errors on the web site.

But do you really want to judge a product based on their web site only? Maybe it's a small company with a great product but only a small (or no) marketing department?

On the other hand, if a company has a great looking web site, does this mean they offer a great product, or does it only mean they have a great marketing and PR division?

Before judging their product, I would certainly check their support forum (how do they handle support request, what problems do customers report). And probably they have a trial version of their product which you can try before you buy.

Update:

Some time ago (~2 years), I was considering evaluating Plastic SCM. But at that time, it seemed that the product was quite new. I then decided to use subversion. So I can't comment on the product itself.

Answer 5

I wouldn't trust such a company. If you sell software in (language) you should put in the money to translate your website professionally.

What about the software itself? What's the quality of it's (language) translation? How about manuals and help files? Support?

Answer 6

It actually looks rather nice. I was considering using it for some free software projects (they offer free licensing for such things) ... but I don't want to incur the wrath that other projects did during the Bitkeeper days.

As an open source developer, I'm rather used to (and don't mind) typographical errors, English is not the official language of planet Earth, despite the efforts of prejudice.

It looks like they have made a good product, they seem to stand behind it, and despite nit picks, the site is easily understood. If proprietary software fits your need, try it, else .. don't .. but I think you are being rather pedantic.

Answer 7

It does say something about a company if the look is not professional, but that applies to more than just whether or not the spelling is correct.

If they don't take the care to have their website professionally translated, can you trust their software? Good question.

The best thing you can do is evaluate their software based on your predicted usage of it, on the software itself. Is the software itself well translated? Can their technical support speak English?

For my personal opinion, I have to say that I'm quite forgiving about this sort of thing (I have experience: I'm English but I work in French, so make all sorts of errors all the time). But that doesn't mean that I'm going to spend any money :-)