SPRs
William Roberts;
liam at cs.qmw.ac.uk
Tue May 28 19:35:59 AEST 1991
In <13673 at goofy.Apple.COM> ksand at apple.com (Kent Sandvik) writes:
>In general MacDTS works with registered developer questions, so most of our
resources
>are working on those questions of natural reasons (they pay for the service,
so they
>get the major service). Also most of our registered developers are working on
>important software packages, and as working for a software company everyone
>knows that quick response is very important, especially in times such as these
>when time-to-market dictates how much you earn.
Uk.DTS is perhaps something of a special case, since the people involved were
a separate A/UX support organisation prior to taking on DTS as well. Technical
A/UX questions address to Apple UK or most UK Apple dealers will just get
passed on to them anyway, so we cut out the "chinese whispers" and go direct.
Remember that Apple on the continental USA is a very different thing from
Apple out in the rest of the world.
>Anyway, reports at aux.support.com is maybe the most logical place for sending
bug
>reports. Unfortunately they can't acknowledge every posted bug report, mostly
due
>to resource limitations as well.
I should like to point out here that i have *never*, *ever* received an
unsolicited acknowledgement to an SPR sent to reports.aux.support.apple.com.
To get acknowledgements I had to put in a comment to the effect "I am totally
&#$#!-off with A/UX Beta-N and unless you people start acknowledging these bug
reports I am going to stop bothering". This is normally good for a message of
the form "No, no - please keep sending in your bug reports", which at least
acts as proof that messages are getting through. There was a period of several
weeks in which all messages to aux.support.apple.com were bounced back by that
machine after some mixup with the mail system: after pointing this out to
postmaster at apple.com, I got back a suggestion that I should FTP the latest
version of sendmail for my system....
>This newsgroup is a great way to make use of the extended A/UX knowledge out
there in the
>field. Originally Usenet was the feeding ground and inofficial support
channel for
>UNIX, and hopefully we could continue to use this newgroup for any kind of
one-to-many
>support.
>Regards,
>Kent Sandvik, Flatworms Group, DTS
Lots of Apple people are very helpful about answering messages and problems
raised on this newsgroup. Lots more Apple people are fixing the bugs that I
(and presumably others) have reported. What is deeply bizarre is that no
attempt ever seems to be made to tell us that our bugs have been fixed!
This is very bad customer management for the following reasons:
1) It is discouraging to beta testers and diligent customers, because it tends
to suggest that Apple doesn't care. Beta testing is not fun, and sending bug
reports into a black hole doesn't make it any better.
2) It does nothing to boost confidence in the product - if you don't have time
to tell me that you've fixed things then I have to test new releases myself to
see if the bugs are still there. If I don't have the time to do so then I just
assume that none of the bugs have been fixed...
3) It wastes customer goodwill and resources. Even judging from recent
postings, there are a lot of A/UX customers who have a wider and detailed
knowledge of things like NFS, and who are more than willing to help track down
problems, experiment with possible solutions etc. You should be making more
use of us!
It seems to me to be an extremely cost-effective exercise to introduce the
following small changes to whatever procedures you currently have:
a) When a bug report is accepted or identified as another instance of an known
bug, tag it with the email address of the sender (there may be several
different senders) and MAIL THE SENDER to let them know what happened. If you
can't reproduce the bug, tell me and maybe I'll try harder myself.
b) When a bug gets fixed and signed off, TELL THE INTERESTED PEOPLE that it
has been fixed and which release the fix is in. Details aren't really
necessary, just bug title.summary and a release number.
Other people can do this (e.g. Sequent), why can't Apple?
--
William Roberts Internet: liam at dcs.qmw.ac.uk
Queen Mary & Westfield College UUCP: liam at qmw-dcs.UUCP
Mile End Road AppleLink: UK0087
LONDON, E1 4NS, UK Tel: +44 71-975 5234 (Fax: +44 81-980 6533)
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