I’ve been a long time customer of NewsGator, I used their original product and I have a license for their Outlook Edition. Today I rebuilt my machine so that I could testing out Visual Studio 2005 BETA 2 and I needed to download and install NewsGator again.

In the past it was relitively easy to find the download, but the new layout for their homepage is hopeless. I challenge you to sit someone down and tell them to find the Outlook edition of the product (not just marketing material – I want the download to use with the key that I already have).

I actually resorted to using Google to find an old reference to it. There are no obvious links from the homepage (that I can see). Now – I know they are trying to emphasise their online and enterprise subscription services but how about a little bit of support for your long time users. I was so annoyed by the whole experience that I actually went and downloaded RSS Bandit.

The point is that NewsGator made a big withdrawl from the goodwill account tonight and the only reason that they got installed on my machine is that I value my unified messaging client (Outlook).

For your reference the download URL can be found here. Given that Greg Reinacker posted up about the BETA of the new version the product can’t be dying – it’s just hiding.