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Lawsuit Alleges That Palms Damage Motherboards
schussat writes: "This brief AP article describes a lawsuit that alleges that syncing a Palm Pilot "damages or destroys the motherboards on certain PC brands." Does anyone know more or have experience with this? Is it even possible to cause damage? The article is not very detailed."
That raises an interesting question. You have a problem when two pieces of equipment interact. One of them blows up. Who to sue? The one that survives, assuming it "broke" the other one? (That seems to be the option taken) The one that breaks, assuming it was a piece of junk to start with? Both?
And the answer is.............THE RICHEST COMPANY, STUPID!!!
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Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
No, it is the kind of attitude that keeps Palm handhelds from costing $900. A firm that sells a $200 handheld cannot afford to do a failure analysis each time some customer claims that they want a free computer because the handheld 'blowed up the motherboard.' The manufacturers need to use statistics and engineering expertise to recognize if a given problem could conceivably be caused by their product. If not, they can't afford to spend time and money on it.
The argument that this company shipped more than 13 million units is hardly support for the premise that they can't screw up.
It is statistical evidence that Palm does not have a design flaw. It's hardly surprising that, with 13,000,000+ units sold, that two people may have experienced a motherboard failure coincident with Hotsyncing their Palms. Probably two others experienced motherboard failures when inserting CD-ROMs, two others had failures while opening Word, and so forth. Things fail and often that failure is coincident with some action, but it does not prove that the action caused the failure.
Both the computer hardware and software industries get away with far too little responsibility to ensure quality in their products.
Software, yes. They hide behind the argument that they are selling a license to use a product rather than a product, thus circumventing consumer protection laws. Hardware manufacturers are a different story. I have gotten notices of class action suits against Iomega, HP, and other firms whose products I have purchased. Intel has recalled CPUs, support chips, motherboards, etc. Hardware manufacturers receive lots of scrutiny.
Okay, let's hypothesize that you are running Palm. What would you do in this situation? Replace the motherboards as a goodwill gesture? That could lead to a loss of confidence in your product and might make others think "free motherboards", after which you would be awash in fraudulent claims. Do you send a team of engineers to investigate the claims? How much will that cost? Do you do it each and every time someone claims that your product caused some failure? Or do you look at statistics (number sold vs. number of reported failures) and your product's engineering and decide to stand by your product? Tell us how you think Palm should handle this.
I mean, really; "damages or destroys the motherboards on certain PC brands" - just a little too vague there for me to take it seriously. Especially with a company that's shifted as many units ("more than 13 million") as Palm.
I called them with a stupid problem and they mailed me a new one. I'm guessing that the first Palm heard of this mess was when the reporter asked them about the suit. If they got an off the wall complaint like that, they would probably have gievn the customer a new box so they could tear apart the old one and see if it had actually happened. From a curiosity standpoint, it'd be worth the money. "I wonder if our product can do that?" Trying to duplicate the results wouldn't work. Getting your hands on a box that (allegedly) it's already happened to is much better.
Sounds like a couple of morons and a law firm willing to spend a couple of associates' time on a crap shoot. Business as usual.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
This is an example of the kind of attitude that keeps corporate users unhappy with their technical support. It's not right to assume that just because you can't imagine the causal connection between (your example) Office 97 and a printing problem that there isn't one. Haven't you personally had many experiences in which changing one variable (say, plugging a printer into a different USB port) immediately precedes something else, seemingly unrelated, "breaking"? No matter how fastidious you are, no matter what operating system you're using, an OS + thousands of programs + all the variability in hardware configurations in the world is far too complex a system for you to intuitively know whether the report of a problem's apparent cause is right.
If you're in a service profession, your job is to serve -- to assume that your customers are reporting, to the best of their ability, what they understand about the situation, and to use the information they give you, however flawed, to find the source of the problem. Up with "stupid users", I say.
The argument that this company shipped more than 13 million units is hardly support for the premise that they can't screw up. And it's a cop-out to lay the blame at the feet of pejoratively-labaled "users". Both the computer hardware and software industries get away with far too little responsibility to ensure quality in their products.
Their computers probably just broke down and they're hoping Palm will settle out of court and give them new ones just to get them to shut up.