Dotan Cohen wrote:
You want the card to work, but don't find it worth the time to tell
that to the company that makes it?!? Harold, here, I've done half the
work for you, go write to them:
http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Content_C1&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1114037291276&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper
I cannot believe what a mess the Linksys website is. Flash mandatory,
region selection, etc...
I totally sympathesize with Harold.
I’ve provided information again and again to companies about problems
with their products, and more often than not get no response, other than
a vague suggestion that hopefully it will be fixed in the next release.
One gets tired of this, especially when in some cases you suspect and in
some cases you know that the company has long known about the bug, but
didn’t bother to tell you.
If OOo itself with its totally open bug report system often messes stuff
up, do you think that private companies with private bug reports don’t?
You send them files to demonstrate their problems. Nothing happens. it
occurs again months later. You call them up to see whether there is a
fix on the way. They’re not sure. Perhaps you could send test files
again. By the third time you give up. It isn’t worth the hassle.
In one case after sending a number of files to demonstrate a Postscript
problem with a printing system, I put the person I was in contact with
on the spot by asking specifically what happened when they ran my files.
He was forced to admit that he had never actually been able to get the
application running in Postscript at all. And we were paying thousands
of dollars a year for instant help. We at least had the application
running Postscript, and running it very well.
In another case, in another company, on a recurring problem, I was
informed by the person I was talking to that this feature I was asking
about had never worked properly. I thanked her, but asked why when I had
previously requested help no-one had simply told me this was an erratic
bug. She told me she didn’t know, since everyone in the company knew
that the routine was buggy.
I knew why ... because I had learned through experience that
representatives from this company would lie, and lie, and lie, and lie.
But they had the best software of its kind in the industry, though not
as good as it might be, often very bad indeed, since they made a
practice of buying out competitors. (And no, this is not Microsoft or
any company related to Microsoft.)
I could go on for hours with stories about such things. FOSS software is
often as bad and its creators as dishonest, but since it is free, there
is normally no great investment lost in dropping a bad product and
moving to a better one, unlike software you have paid for. So bad
products don’t get into departments and then get used because the person
who bought it can’t really admit to his boss that the software doesn’t
work properly. They just die off, unless they do get better.
It wears you down, as you suspect that you are spending more time
working on document problems to improve a product than the people who
are paid to do so, and in some case you suspect that anything you send
them just ends up in the garbage. They pretend to listen just to keep
you quiet and hopefully to fool you that the money you are paying for
help goes somewhere.
I’ve sometimes fixed problems in house, sometimes very quickly, after
they’ve had a consultant from the software company fail at it.
A well known industry example: Quark Express totally ignored all
complaints about their non-support of Unicode and non-support of
advanced font features until Adobe Indesign caught up to them and was
very quickly taking away their market. That’s what got them off their
duffs, not any letters or complaints.
Jim Allan
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