2008/6/13 Jim Allan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > 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 >
I sympathize with Harold as well. Write to them anyway. Let them know that we will buy their products if they support the L-word. If they hear it enough times, something may change. It won't even take you three minutes. Dotan Cohen http://what-is-what.com http://gibberish.co.il א-ב-ג-ד-ה-ו-ז-ח-ט-י-ך-כ-ל-ם-מ-ן-נ-ס-ע-ף-פ-ץ-צ-ק-ר-ש-ת A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
