Open Letter To The Software Industry
By Mitch Berg
To: The Software industry
From: Mitch Berg
Re: Mislabeling.
To whom it may concern,
A “support forum” where you can go ask questions of other equally-frustrated users of your crappy product is not, in fact, “support”.
No, keep the forum. Just quit calling it part of your “support service”.
That is all.
MBerg
May 7th, 2008 at 11:14 am
My old webhost company Starlogic.com used to do that until all of the dissatisfied users started discussing the best places to move their websites. Then the forum got shut down.
I’m much happier at my new site.
May 7th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Actually, that is for helping the company find out where they need support… it’s like a feedback forum.
Not good for PR, though. 😉
May 7th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
My old webhost company Starlogic.com used to do that until all of the dissatisfied users started discussing the best places to move their websites. Then the forum got shut down.
Brilliant! Mitch could use the “support service” forum to discuss comperable or superior software alternatives and where dissatisfied customers can go to get them. Or start a thread announcing your intention to file a class action suit and asking dissatisfied customers to send you their contact information and to pass the message along to other angry users.
May 7th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Those forums and a bit of Google-fu beat the official software support systems 99.999% of the time. Have you ever called MS about their development tools? I can spend 28 hours escalating my problem from some underpaid, useless tech support schmuck in India trying stuff by some script, to his manager, to the next level of tech support, to the next level (finally back in the US and a guy who’s usually semi-competent), only to have my problem finally marked as a ticket to be solved sometime later.
Of course, I remember when those forums were on a company’s BBS. And I remember them being even more useless back the since Google quality searching didn’t exist. So I’m more jaded than you, Mitch, and I’ve given up all hope of support from software companies; I’ve yet to see one company do a good job of it. It’s enough to make a guy turn to the Open Source stuff where can usually get an answer from the guy who did it if you ask the right way.
May 7th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
“”Those forums and a bit of Google-fu beat the official software support systems 99.999%””
Someone at school asked my how I could possible know so much about technology no matter what the problem. I looked at them smiled, and said ‘Google is my best friend’
Very seldom do I even bother calling any tech help line. Ranks right up there with reading READ ME files *laughing*
Flash
May 7th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
With the help of google I was able to build a working linux/winXP cross compiler on my laptop. I will out-nerd Nerdbert yet!
May 7th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
I cross compiled X11R4 on a Sparc 1 for use on a Sun386i, if you want to go nerd. That was in the gcc1 days and well before Google, so it wasn’t a trivial exercise: endian difficulties, bad optimizations, etc. I had more than a few bug fixes in gcc before that thing worked, and nobody else ever bothered to do another X11 for the 386i release that I found out about. Of course, the 386i was a bastard child, put out by the Sun folks on the East coast in response to a federal government mandate to use the Intel 386 in their computing, so it was never well supported even by Sun. Support and infrastructure being sh*t was not an excuse management accepted for having their purdy toy not working, however, so off I went.
But if you want “cross compile” some *nix program for use on XP I prefer the cygwin tools since everything’s already done for you. Much easier to build and install. It’s almost like having a GNU environment on XP. I find myself dropping into a bash window on XP frequently to do file manipulations and analysis since it’s a heck of a lot faster than trying to use the GUI in Windows.
May 8th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
X11R4! I didn’t know there was anything earlier than X11R6! I am not worthy!
I tried cygwin & msys but they have problems. The documentation that describes how they work together is crap. Msys is tied to MS drive nomenclature — when you install msys it insists on using letter designations for drives & that makes it difficult to install msys on a usb drive and move it from one host to another.
Cygwin has a lot of nice utilities but it prefers to build apps for X rather than XP & GTK runtime. I need to port software that will run on machines that do not have cygwin installed.
I am about to give up autoconf. What worthless piece of %!@*. It’s better to use automake & sort out the architecture with #IFDEF’s in the makefile template.