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What Is Fair Technical Support From a Manufacturer?
VincenzoRomano asks: "One year ago, I decided to buy some 'enterprise grade' firewalls, in order to replace the old ones used by a former ISP. Before buying, I did a bit of a survey. I browsed the product 'data sheets' from the manufacturer web sites, and in some cases, asked for more details by email. I finally choose a top product, that had been on the market for a year and a half, from a very well known and reputable company. The product showed a number of issues as soon as it was unpacked and put to work, that you would not expect from something 'enterprise grade', like not being able to keep a VPN up and running for more than a few minutes, or doing bad IP routing on our LAN. I've spent the last year to make the equipment working, accordingly to both their data sheets and the features expected from an 'enterprise grade' product. Important issues are still open while the technical support is actually relying on my own stuff and setup, and on my personal availability in order to do troubleshooting, firmware beta testing and other experiments. I've finally decided that the product was far from being ready to market or even usable for beta testers, and have requested some kind of compensation for all the job I had to do. What's your opinion about such a behavior in a company? Is it fair?"
Assuming you have set everything up correctly (and I'm not saying that to be an ass, just that a lot of times people complain about hardware and it's configured incorrectly) and it is not working as advertized, then you certainly should be upset with the manufacturer. However demanding compensation from them is a bit much. Part of your job (I am assuming) is picking the right hardware for your company. That means testing it before deployment in a production environment. If you deployed the wrong hardware (even if on paper it looked right) that's not the fault of the company.
Sadly all too often, bosses don't see the 'value' of a test environment. There's plenty of large companies out there, that do, and they don't do it just because they like to waste money - My current employer buys everything in 4s. One for dev, one for testing/acceptance, one for production and one for disaster recovery.
Seems a bit wasteful, but the first time your test environment gets blatted by a 'major issue' you will cry tears of joy that you didn't have your production environment running that.
"I finally choose a top product, that had been on the market for a year and a half, from a very well known and reputable company."
Something sounds fishy here. A 'top' product from a reputable company on the market for 18 months but it doesn't work?
(a) Since there are no names mentioned, maybe it's not a top product from a reputable company.
(b) You are trying to use the product for something it was not designed.
(c) You're a customerzilla that is a networking legend in his own mind.
In any event, you chose the product so you've got to deal with it. You either toss the device or continue your CYA exercise and get something out of your 'investment'. Apart from an apology and updated firmware, they really owe you nothing. Maybe they can offer you a job. But would you want to work for a company that would allegedly ship bad products?
Regardless, you need to realize that "shit breaking" is part of IT.
And that is why people in general have a dim view of computers... Not to mention the people who operate them.
I think the computer world in general needs to do a lot more in this regard - consider a television. It's got a relatively simple interface (depending on the model, but they're all usually pretty similar), and it's got "uptime" and MTBF that would make any server manufacturer more than proud. Why would the general population want to watch TV on their PC when (a) the TV is cheaper, (b) it works right out of the box, and (c) it's not going to be buggy or go obsolete suddenly (the impending HDTV changeover notwithstanding).
Software manufacturers (including you programmers who read Slashdot) - spend less time adding the next new feature and more time making sure the existing features work. Stop using us as your beta testers!
You bought it. It didn't work. Tech support couldn't fix the problem.
You had two options: work with the reduced functionality or send the product back. It sounds like you chose the former and are now regretting the decision.
Maybe you needed a custom solution that was actually outside of your budget.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If a manufacturer starts losing sales due to bad word of mouth then they will either increase support or get marginalized in the environment they compete in. If people continue to buy their stuff then obviously they aren't doing enough research before buying. This is the biggest issue I have seen where bad companies persist, people love to claim doing great research and get stuck on a product because of one or two things that pique their interest losing focus on the bad sides.
If you feel as if your getting the short end of the stick then why continue to use their product ? Also, make sure others know about it. If your not willing to take the time to let others know about the issues then it can't be a major problem.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
While I agree in general with your comments, I have to disagree about testing hardware in real world conditions. I believe that any "top" manufacturer would have a decent-sized test lab where the device in question could be hooked up to the lab network and be put through its paces. I figure such a lab could have a secure link to the Web to suck down traffic to run through the lab network. This kind of setup would allow for fairly thorough testing that would closely approximate the kind of setups that customers would have.
I recall visiting Novell's test lab many years ago in Provo, UT where they had a warehouse sized room of PC's on racks(just aluminum frame racks, not the current rackmount type). I was told that they ran their products on this test network heavily before releasing their products. Granted, that was an internal network, but as I recall in its day Netware and its associated products were known for their reliability in production environments.
To sum up: I think that major manufacturers can test their products under real world conditions. If they don't, we should stop buying their products. To go back to my Novell case, apparently one of the factors in that company's decline was that their marketing people failed to realize that flashing a few slides in front of non-IT suits would get more sales than explaining their product to the IT people who would actually use it. So a big part of the problem is C-level execs making purchasing decisions without really paying attention to IT's concerns.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."