Software Support

drbam wrote on 8/9/2003, 1:13 PM
There's a lot of complaining on almost any forum about the level of support one receives from the software developers. In my experience SOFO is pretty damn good compared to a lot of others. The point being is that there is an article in the most recent Consumer Reports mag (arrived in the mail 2 days ago) that addresses this issue. For me, it offered a much wider perspective than I'd realized and unfortunately the future doesn't look promising. ;-(

drbam

Comments

PipelineAudio wrote on 8/9/2003, 4:11 PM
SF support is pretty good to us. Night and day from UA
Chienworks wrote on 8/9/2003, 7:43 PM
drbam, would you care to elaborate?
drbam wrote on 8/10/2003, 9:00 AM
>>drbam, would you care to elaborate? <<

I would refer you to the Consumer Reports article, which prompted my post. Its way too detailed to go into here. However, a quick summary is that the primary area being cut by virtually all software developers (and the technology industry in general) is that of customer support. The article deals primarily with software and I found it enlightening albeit disheartening. It points out the dark fact that most (if not all) of these companies knowingly use EVERY customer as a beta tester whether we volunteer or not and rush products to market knowing clearly that they are not ready; a practice that is dishonest and unethical and is probably my #1 pet peeve with the entire industry. This issue probably isn't a surprise to most of us here but it explains a lot and makes me even more grateful for the level of support I've experienced with SOFO. Once an issue ends up in CR as a feature article like this, you can be sure its a HUGE problem. Maybe 60 Minutes will do a feature on it at some point. . . (I hope). ;-)

drbam
Geoff_Wood wrote on 8/10/2003, 11:53 PM
There are beta-testing proceedures that occur before updates are sent out, definitely in SF and I can't imagine in every other software house of note.

However the loud and harder we demand instant fixes and updates, the more pressure there is for the product or update to be released before ready. It must be to SFs credit that they don't release updates willy-nilly (although an update may not fix everybodies problems)...


geoff
farss wrote on 8/13/2003, 9:06 AM
I'm a very small time software developer serving a niche market. I can tell you this is no small issue. Whilst everyone wants more customer support most software houses have a lot of red ink on the bottom line, SoFo is no exception. So providing an excellent product and excellent customer support is no guarantee of a profitable enterprise.

I think we all like to view any company as a monolith but in reality its just a group of people who have to get paid a decent wage and on to of that provide a dividend to shareholders. One of the biggest costs is customer support and a large part of that is generated by people who don't RTFM. I'm not trying to excuse the bad guys here, but it's the same for the good ones as well.

The other very big issue for software houses is trying to generate an ongoing income stream. Software doesn't wear out and everyone is reluctant to pay for support yet somehow it has to get paid for. If you've written a brilliant, stable bit of code that does everything imaginable once it has saturated the market there's no more income to be made. Even bringing out a new version with a few more widgets at best you'll get 50% of your existing customers to upgrade, just look at the number of PCs still running Win98.

I don't really have any easy answers to these issues, I'm certain better brains than mine have grappled with it but we need to keep it in mind leat we delude ourselves that any company has bottomless pockets.
drbam wrote on 8/13/2003, 9:43 AM
>>I'm not trying to excuse the bad guys here, but it's the same for the good ones as well.<<

Yes, I agree and yes this is has been a very difficult time for developers. However, companies that are not forthcoming about using all customers as beta testers and then charging the customer extra for providing this service are clearly in violation of good business ethics, and in my view, are dishonest as hell. ;-)

drbam
Rednroll wrote on 8/13/2003, 3:18 PM
"However, companies that are not forthcoming about using all customers as beta testers and then charging the customer extra for providing this service are clearly in violation of good business ethics"

This is true, however.......you see a lot of people in these forums alone crying for new releases, either it's bug fixes, new feature requests, or major version revisions. I'm sure most software companies could produce a rock solid nearly bug free piece of software, given the resources and time to do so. But then by the time that software was released it would be 1 year behind in features compared to everyone else. So which is the lessor of 2 evils. A rock solid piece of software that works on 99.9% of the hardware configuration, but has 10% of the features of the competition or software with 99.9% of the latest features but has a problems with 10% of all the available hardware configurations? I'll put my vote in for the later and go for the easy downloadable updates as problems start to rear their ugly head. In a perfect world we would have ALL the available features, with a great user interface, and have no problems with any system it was installed on with the first release. I don't see that perfect world scenario coming from anyone, anytime soon. Hell, microsoft has a page on their website decated to updates....and that's for the OS, which all these perfect programs need to run on top of.
Rednroll wrote on 8/13/2003, 3:25 PM
"However, companies that are not forthcoming about using all customers as beta testers and then charging the customer extra for providing this service are clearly in violation of good business ethics"

This is true, however.......you see a lot of people in these forums alone crying for new releases, either it's bug fixes, new feature requests, or major version revisions. I'm sure most software companies could produce a rock solid nearly bug free piece of software, given the resources and time to do so. But then by the time that software was released it would be 1 year behind in features compared to everyone else. So which is the lessor of 2 evils? A rock solid piece of software that works on 99.9% of the hardware configurations, but has 10% of the features of the competition or software with 99.9% of the latest features but has a problem with 10% of all the available hardware configurations? I'll put my vote in for the later and go for the easy downloadable updates as problems start to rear their ugly head. In a perfect world we would have ALL the available features, with a great user interface, and have no problems with any system it was installed on with the first release. I don't see that perfect world scenario coming from anyone, anytime soon. Hell, microsoft has a page on their website decated to updates....and that's for the OS, which all these perfect programs need to run on top of.

"then charging the customer extra for providing this service"

I've used almost every version and every product Sonic Foundry has ever offered. I have never had to call customer support once for help. Why? Probably, because I've done a lot of reading on my own part on how to properly maintain, trouble shoot, and setup a DAW. So to me the bottom line is, your own laziness and lack of knowledge should cost you money. or as Forest Gump would say "Stupid is as Stupid does". People pay me for the audio knowledge I have....don't you feel you should have to pay someone else for their knowledge?

Red
drbam wrote on 8/13/2003, 5:40 PM
>>People pay me for the audio knowledge I have....don't you feel you should have to pay someone else for their knowledge?<<

Absolutely! But I think you missed the point I was trying to make. I was criticizing the exploitive policy of releasing software to the *general public* (I'm not referring to the users on this forum or other similar types) knowing full well that the customer will serve in the role of beta tester; something the customer is unaware of. The company then charges the customer for support services and the company gets to use the customers' feedback to fix the product so the customer can then have what they original paid for. This sucks and is inherently dishonest in my view. If I knowingly contract with you or anyone else for your knowledge or expertise, of course I expect to pay for it. These are very different scenarios. Hope this clarifies where I'm coming from here. ;-)

drbam
farss wrote on 8/14/2003, 3:06 AM
There's been quite a few very valid comments here, I know this forum doesn't reflect the situation with the general public, but it's still good to see a high level of awareness even in this rarefied air.

I have to agree there are companies using the public as beta testers. And I agree that mightn't be such a bad thing if they were honest about it, owned up to the bugs and didn't expect you to pay for the priveledge of getting them fixed etc. Oh hang on, isn't that what beta releases are, if you agree to be a beta tester don't you then get the final release at a big discount?

Somebody did raise a valid point though, even uStuff who aren't exactly short of resources get things screwed up, in all fairness to them they do fix problems and they usually do so for free. But thats what applications sit on top off, and that in turn sits on top of a hardware platform. To further compound the number of potential problem areas applications and operating systems are written in high level languages, these too can have bugs, many early C implementations were notorious for memory leaks. Applications written with them would run fine, for a while.

And another big issue is trying to test every possible combination of functionality. Look through the latest VV release list of bug fixes. I've never encountered one of them and I'll bet most users are in the same boat, hell half of them I still can't work out what you'd have to do to invoke the problem.

Even Apple who have control of the hardware, the operating system and most of the applications still have their machines crash. Given the comparison its remarkable that the Wintel machines are so stable.

A couple of weeks ago I had to drive a long way to a site to investigate a problem with my application, it sounded like a really simple problem. The database wouldn't let them enter clients gender, kept saying the value wasn't in the list. After a lot of head scratching including reloading the code, copying the code from their PC onto my laptop I finally found it. The app. has autocorrect enabled and they had somehow selected a wierd dictionary. Every time they selected 'M' or 'F' from a drop down it was corrected by adding a few extra characters on the end.