Support matters

[William Vajk]

In article <402 at uport.UUCP>, plocher at uport.UUCP (John Plocher) writes:
 
> I'm new here at Microport; meetings are one of the only ways I have of
> "learning the ropes".  Sorry if I can't always jump when the phone rings,
> but if I'd spend all my time on the horn I couldn't get anything *else* done.
 
Excuse me for saying so, nothing personal in this at all, but the last time
I heard this sort of thing was from my new life insurance agent, who 'was 
gonna be around for a long time', and the time before that, by perhaps 
6 months was from his predecessor, ad infinitum. Each was to set the world 
on fire by reviewing 'my plan' and making things better (read sell a hot new 
product and earn a commission, while dumping everything the guy before did.)

I must have missed it, listening to new promises from uport can make people
behave this way, but are you engineering, customer support, sales, partner,
or what. If you are anything less than a responsible partner (means you have
breathed new financial blood into the company) then your hands are tied by
the two moneymen in the company, and everything you're here to say is simply
to placate upset purchasers. If you're the person in charge of customer service,
you would do real well to listen to what the customers are saying about your
company and forget the meetings till you have something to offer instead of
listening to all the stuff we, the customers, have heard for the past year 
plus. You're darn right you couldn't get anything else done, there are an
awful lot of unhappy purchasers out here. Could so many people *all* be
wrong ? We also recognize that all unhappy customers aren't on usenet, let
alone vocal. The magnitude just kinda keeps growing.........

If the product worked as promised, your job would be an easy one with only
a few ropes to learn. As matters stand.......

> 		Contact your sales rep for details.

WHOSE sales rep ? Certainly not mine. Since you are _new_ to uport
let me tell you what the sales rep told me when I first called to
purchase 286/V. I asked "is there any '286 machine which cannot
run your product?" The response was "if you find one, please let us 
know because we have been unable to find any machines on which Microport
unix will not run." If uport wishes to behave as a corporate Robinson,
I suppose you could pick apart the meaning of the word 'run.'

In October or so of last year, I purchased an upgrade, and the serial 
drivers were still not fixed. When I phoned to complain, the first 
question was "do you have a support contract ?"

An ethical business sells support contracts to provide user support,
not to spend time on the phone trying to convince the customer that
it is a hardware problem. See above about 'cannot find hardawre uport
will not run on.' It was determined that MY driver problems must have to
do with hardware. Uport completely ignored the fact that I was not alone
with driver problems, that in fact everyone using serial drivers for
call in lines had the same problem, and we all still do. There must be
something quite special about your in house machine. Dwight Leu told
me on several occasions just how well it runs.

I've offered to go beg, borrow, or steal whatever definable configuration
of hardware would run my software correctly, without sio driver problems.
To date, I have not received any reply to this question. I can assume only
that there is no hardware on which microport 286 will run as it is supposed
to, that is, with minimal system loading uport software will ALWAYS cause
lost characters. I beg you to prove me wrong. Send me the hardware for
beta test here. I'll return it with written verdict on usenet. Using
someone's smart sio card and THEIR software drivers does NOT count. We're
talking about standard 286 hardware and microport software with only
two (2) sio ports, and a printer port.

One of my beefs with uport, and I've stated this time and again in this
newsgroup, is that support is never supposed to mean paying a publisher
to cover their tracks for screwups. Support is supposed to mean helping
a customer lacking information or experience to use the product. I've
never once requested _support_ from your firm. For many months I have
asked uport to fix the product.

To microport's credit, they did send me a driver fix. To microport's
discredit, the drivers don't work much better than the old ones. Yes,
the problems with double panics have been reduced. Now the system
still loses characters like mad, but won't panic and shut down as 
easily. Again, we're not talking about a heavily loaded mode of
operation. Lost characters seem to be the best known microport feature.
Care to address how this affects the thruput of long uucp transactions
and the attendant costs ? 

> 	"Beta" does NOT mean "production" or "placate an upset customer"
> 	or "get a free upgrade"; now that I'm here, Beta means BETA, and
> 	not early shipping.

Just why is it that uport feels they can continue to ignore old problems
while developing new products, apparently also quite buggy. You really
should consider the present version of your '286 product to still be BETA.

Is it perhaps early shipping ?

A closing thought or few.

If uport were an automobile manufacturer, they'd have been in bankruptcy
a long time ago because of recalls to which the automotive industry
is subject. It is the sort of thing that uport is doing that might well
establish textbook cases for fraud in software publishing, and attendant
personal liability for corporate officers in this industry.

Bill (fix the product) Vajk                                 learn at igloo