Phil,

Once again, my sincere apologies. I was very unprofessional, unproductive, and most of all inconsiderate. I do respect you, even though I sure didn't act like it. Not one of my better 24 hours either 🙁 sorry I had to make yours worse....

Michael wrote:

Johannes wrote:

We all hope that this pipeline will be more efficiant and productive than the former "VOICE OF CUSTOMER AND FUTURE YAMAHA SYNTHS " that disappeared over the nirvana of the Yamaha labyrinth... 😉

Here here, well said. A bit disr espectful to the customer... Ie: shut up we are not interested and bothered about talking through your ideas. We are going to keep doing what we want and just ignore you.

Not actually, that information was duly gathered by the party involved with product planning. It by no means was discarded, but for whatever reasons, perhaps legal, it was deemed best to not have that particular type of thread open as it was... Did somebody abuse it, I don't really know. That decision was not made lightly and far above my pay grade.

Certainly, the success of the Motif series over the past fifteen years, in part was a result of the close contact with customers, via surveys, artist contacts, etc. not every decision is going to make everyone happy, that's for sure. We put up a survey back early on in its life-cycle and were absolutely flooded with responses - well beyond our wildest expectations, and that truly helped the Motif-series, and its siblings, evolve into an unprecedented success. Just because the Voice of the Customer thread was taken down doesn't mean we tossed it into the hamper. What kind of sense would that make, I mean really?

Just for some perspective: We were told in open forum that the Motif would never ever succeed (small screen, not a touch screen, SmartMedia card instead of floppy disk drive, nobody wants plug-in boards, etc., etc.,) we were called all kinds of 'out of touch' and worse, etc., etc., and I'll never buy another Yamaha, I'd love to run those original threads again. Frankly, the response was very, very similar to the empassioned posts we are getting right now. 🙂 that's fine. It's good, it's healthy. Just don't shoot the messenger, I'd appreciate that.

Know this, Yamaha has thousands of musical products in the market... Most of them are not for you (unless you play a very wide variety of musical instruments) not even all the keyboards we make are going to be for you. That's the nature of the beast.

Thank you for the feedback Phil, it's always appreciated. I would never shoot the messenger because you're the only one that chats really. Maybe I'm at a junction at the moment trying to find a solution for my needs, maybe I need to look elsewhere? Maybe I got excited about the reface marketing and then disappointed because it wasn't something I could enjoy in reality. Dunno.

Seriously though, good luck with the new products.

Thanks for listening.
Cheers
Mick.