> I wasn't going to answer this, until I read a response that said, in effect,
> "You either have to put up with this, or get even." Neither is a valid
> option in my lexicon--the first is accepting a shoddy business practice, the
> latter nothing more than hacker attack. (To be fair, the author didn't
> propound taking the second tack.)
While my post had a slightly tongue-in-cheek aspect, please note that your
experiences of getting remedial attention may very well be atypical. When dealing
with a large vendor, rather than a small one, the user of defective software has
literally no clout, and entreaties, however politely phrased, are unlikely to
elicit satisfactory results. As an example, we once tried to get a replacement
disk from Microsoft, and no number of polite calls, letters, or faxes would get
them to pay the slightest attention. We purchased a Borland Java RAD product that
very plainly had advertised parts missing, yet Borland was uninterested and did
nothing about it.
It is, as we all know, very costly to develop software, particularly software
capable of succeeding in the mass market. If there's a bug in the finished
product, no rational software seller is going to invest the enormous effort
required to fix it if the market will, for the most part, accept it as it is, and
that is clearly what usually happens.
The software that we write here goes to individual customers, just the antithesis
of the Microsoft/Borland market, and you may take it as given that we are highly
responsive to customer complaints. The truth of the marketplace is that the
seller's attention to your complaints is proportional to your ability to hurt him
by taking your trade elsewhere. If a polite but firm request for correction works,
fine. Thing is, that is the exception and not the rule.
The software industry loves to scream and posture about piracy, yet it remains
blithely and sublimely indifferent to complaints about its own offenses against
customers. By the way, "hacker attack" was not actually what I was adverting to.
And anyway, shouldn't that be "cracker attack"?
--
David Fisher
Chief Engineer
Fisher Research Corporation
Rochester, New York
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
716 328 4230
fax 328 1984
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