Unreliable Software and After Sales Support
In an ideal world all the software that we buy would be robust, reliable and bug-free, but we're realists and we know that this is very unlikely ever to be the case.
However, as customers handing over hard earned money we do expect a certain degree of reliability in the software products we buy. We expect the creators and programmers to have at least beta tested the product to such a standard that it works in the way intended without too much tweaking and support.
So why is it then that software vendors seem to think it's acceptable business practice to sell us their poorly prepared products and then enlist the unpaid support of their own customers to deal with many of the faults that manifest once it's in use? They set up forums to encourage the sharing of information when what they really mean is 'sort it out amongst yourselves'.
Naturally I understand that such forums are often of immense benefit to the customers, but there's a tendency among software vendors to rely upon the unpaid volunteers within forums to do what they should be doing i.e. fixing bugs and other problems that are frustrating their customers.
Why do they offer such poor after-sales support? They set up a ticketing system (which usually involves laborious repetitive form filling each time a ticket has to be raised) and days later you receive response that's either a request for more information or an instruction to upgrade with a patch. It's you, the customer, who has to take the risk with the upgrade not to mention the effort and time expended in doing so.
If the vendors find themselves overwhelmed with support requests they cynically introduce a 'premium support' service whereby their customers have to pay to obtain a timely response. So once again the customer pays.
Like the advert says, we don't want to complain, we just want things to work. We buy these products for a purpose, as tools for projects. We don't expect to have to waste time, effort and money fixing faults that should have been ironed out in the testing phase.
Programmers and software vendors take note!
