Absolutely agreed with all of your points. While, admittedly, my tone has been rather aggressive it has not been my intention to aggressively do anything than

Absolutely agreed with all of your points. While, admittedly, my tone has been rather aggressive it has not been my intention to aggressively do anything than to say "you are making a big mistake". Making an "orders of magnitude" claim in a field like manufacturing can only happen if your customers are utterly ignorant. Find a tribe deep in some unknown forest who knows nothing about modern technology. Show up with a box of matches. You've made fire-starting "orders of magnitude" easier. Today I had a meeting with my local Haas representative. Yes, it's Sunday. I'm buying another machine and he is very accommodating due to year-end needs. We had an interesting conversation about improvements in the industry. Haas introduced an updated control about a year ago. If you look around on the 'net there are people who hate it. Some even talk about having returned machines due to the new control (and buying used machines with the old software). Are the controls that different? No, not really. However, to an experienced machinist who has been running these machines daily for years their "muscle memory" gets them into trouble when using the new control. I would compare it to switching between Mac and PC keyboards. I do that all the time and it can be a pain in the ass. When developing iOS code I have to use a Mac while all other tools are on our PC's including such things as Photoshop. My solution was to install a piece of software that allows me to remap the keyboard on the Mac to match a PC with sufficient fidelity to eliminate the cognitive load of using both platforms back-to-back. Imagine now having a shop with half a million dollars of machines you know how to use like you are playing a piano and the "new and improved" version of the machine has you making mistakes and feeling like you don't know what you are doing. It isn't that bad but there's enough of a cognitive load for some (not all, a few) of those who have to deal with this to not be happy with Haas. Another example is when MS switched-up the UI from Office 2003 to 2007. I felt like moron for a few weeks. And then we have someone come along and suggest they are going to make things more like software development and achieve an "orders of magnitude" improvement in manufacturing. While, in the real world, a highly experienced, well respected, leading-edge manufacturing company has to take baby steps to improve the UI and control of their $100K to $500K machines. The reality of manufacturing is that people need to make things, not play with toys (hardware or software) every time a new shiny thing is put on the table. I wish these guys the best but their messaging is horrible. To anyone who knows manufacturing it screams "I don't know what I am talking about". I am sure there are a bunch of Kickstarter projects that could use help. If they can build a business around that, fantastic.