16 Nov
2011
16 Nov
'11
9:51 p.m.
On 11/16/11 8:23 PM, "Dave McGuire" <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On 11/16/2011 10:24 PM, Mouse wrote:
One of the companies that I have used their software for testing generally
has horrible support, many times I would open a support ticket and would get
either A: Completely irrelevant information that had nothing to do with the
problem I was asking about or B: Completely incorrect or incomplete
information AND C: a request for information that I provided in the initial
ticket I opened :( the company support years ago was great, then they
decided to outsource most of their support, so the quality went into the
toilet. Then a few years later they were bought out by a large
multinational corporation and said company axed 90% of the existing staff
and were generous enough to allow them to apply for positions as contract
staff if they wanted to be slapped in the face again and get paid 50% to 75%
of what they were getting paid before.
I once worked on a robotics project that involved
JPL and some Sun
hardware. JPL bought the right to internal support from Sun, as in,
we could call and talk to one of their internal techs.
We tried it. More than once (I don't recall exactly how often). Every
time, we already knew more about the thing we were asking about than
the tech we spoke with did.
And this was the special spend-oodles-of-money level of support.
I am very thoroughly cynical about proprietary vendor "support".
I'm right there with you on that. Vendor support is nearly always a
joke. It will never be half as good as an experienced engineer with
access to the source code. Sun is particularly bad about this...I can't
count the number of things I've taught Sun employees about Sun computers
and OSs.
-Dave