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?"

Comments

Welcome to IT?

[EveryNickIsTaken]

What you're describing was fairly commonplace back in 1994-1997 when I was helping start up a regional ISP. To a certain extent, it was "neat" that we were finding bugs in brand new routers (Cisco + Bay were the usual culprits). Of course, it was a pain in the ass that it'd typically take hours, days, or weeks to realize that the hardware/software was bugged.

As technology has progressed, things certainly have gotten better. Regardless, you need to realize that "shit breaking" is part of IT. Don't like it? Leave the field.

Re:Welcome to IT?

[Sobrique]

Sadly so. Almost any product out there has bugs. If you're lucky, the really sucky ones are already gone. But only if you're lucky. I have memories of a NAS upgrade, that resulted in 8 TB of 'possibly corrupt' data, over long enough interval that just restoring a 'known good' backup just wasn't an option.

I'm afraid it's normal that 'new toys' have problems. Your only way of really avoiding, or at least migating this is to stay one release behind the latest and greatest. You've got good odds that by the time the 'next release' is finished, most of the real killer gotchas will have been found.

In part, it's laziness in testing. In part, it's the simple fact that it's definitely non-trivial to exhaustively test something in teh kind of intensive environment you see in the 'real world'. Things like race conditions typically don't occur often enough to be noticed in testing, but will start to crop up often enough to be a real problem in the real world.

Acceptable? No, not really. Fairly commonplace? Hell yeah.

Don't trust any .0 release. Don't trust anything that's sold to you as the 'newest and feature laden'. Ask yourself if you _really_ need that totally new and cool (and therefore almost certainly not properly tested) feature, or if actually, a revision or two back would do what you need.

With the best will in the world, a test environment will never really compete with a couple of hundred thousand people using it, for finding 'problems'.

You will almost certainly find that the EULA also includes a get out clause for exactly this kind of behaviour.

Re:Welcome to IT?

[BVis]

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.

A television is a far simpler device than a modern computer. No hard drive, no networking, etc. Comparing a television with a PC is about the same as comparing a digital watch to a PC. The more complicated and powerful the system, the more that can go wrong.

And what the hell is "the computer world in general"? I think it's pretty safe to assume you don't know what the hell you're talking about. I bet you've got 12:00 still flashing on your VCR.

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).

My current television cost 5 times what my current computer cost. ($2000 HDTV versus about $400 for the PC I put together myself.) The TV has crashed on me a few times. I don't know where you're getting your information from, but I suggest you catch up to the times.

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!

Stop yelling at the programmers. Programmers have about as much to do with when a product is released or how much testing it gets as the guy who empties the trash at an auto factory has with the quality of the product.

Granted, better programming USUALLY leads to fewer bugs, IF they're not crippled by terrible managers more interested in getting ahead based on other people's work, IF marketing doesn't make outlandish promises involving technologies that don't exist and/or statistics that mean absolutely nothing, IF there are enough programmers on a project to make things sane, IF IF IF.

Case in point: I work for a software company as a research engineer. In a meeting about a month ago, the VP of Sales (who tragically is making all the engineering prioritization decisions) asked our QA manager how long it was going to take to test a product before it could be released. The QA manager replied "Two weeks." The VP IMMEDIATELY said "One week." QA: "Two weeks" VP: "One week, you never give QA as much time as they want." No explanation, no justification other than "Oh QA always takes too long, just release it." Given the option, programmers write good code. They're rarely given the option.

Perhaps you should consider being part of the solution as opposed to just bitching about the problem. Failing that, try using some actual facts or reality-based information in your arguments.

Re:Welcome to IT?

[stu72]

All great advice but try telling that to customers.

People buy IT products on features, not reliablity or usability. If you stop developing new features to focus on reliablity, your customers will, in short order, abandon you for the guy pumping out feature after feature, however buggy.

I'm not saying this is rational, but it's how non-IT (and some IT) people make IT buying decisions, and that drives the industry.

Re:Welcome to IT?

[gregmac]

You may be first to market but if you do a really sloppy job of it, then word will spread and you can forget about getting big contracts in the future. One word: Microsoft.

Re:Welcome to IT?

[Eagleartoo]

I really wish I had mod points right now because you stole what I was going to say =) . Releasing a product that has to continually be patched because of it's verbosity is not my idea of a good product. When I switched to apple the only time it really screwed up is when I did something that taxed the system, and the software that was built in was like the AM/FM radio in your car. You turn it on and it works. What you are seeing in the bugginess of new hardware/software is simply greed. There hasn't been a better computer since unix.

Re:Welcome to IT?

[Scott7477]

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.

Re:Welcome to IT?

[raddan]

Firewalls have been around long enough where I simply wouldn't accept this nowadays. I put up with proprietary firewalls for years that were purchased before I was hired here. They were purchased because they had long feature lists and snappy GUIs. But in practice, they were garbage. Their state tables were small, so they often dropped connections. Their VPN implementations were buggy (in fact, a 'factory authorized field consultant' from this one particular company said that no one *really* knew how their IPSec stack worked; I know he was saying this to me in order to give me that "I'm on your side, buddy" kind of feeling, but it made me immediately lose faith in their product). Often the GUIs did not display the proper state of the machine. To add insult to injury, our paid support contract did not include 'premium' features such as access to their tech info library, where you would find out what error IDs actually meant.

After one particularly bad episode with the firewall, where we were required to replace a failing hard drive, we started looking for something new. That hard drive was a standard 2.5 inch Hitachi 40 GB-- but they charged us $500 for the "authorized" part so we wouldn't void our warranty. If they're going to charge you $500 for a part that should cost $100, fuck the warranty, man!

After evaluating our options, we settled on OpenBSD's PF. Several linux firewalls were considered as well, but we went with BSD because we were more familiar with it. We've been extremely pleased with our choice. PF gets better and better with each release, it is highly flexible and customizable, and the rule syntax was easy to learn. We have features that would cost us an arm and a leg in their proprietary counterparts (VPN, dynamic rulesets, firewall failover, and so on), and we can build it on commodity hardware. There's a huge community that has given us technical and moral support, and documentation is freely available. These are full computers, too, so if we need to write a custom monitor or report, piece of cake! And the savings in time and money have been enormous.

And this taught us an extremely valuable lesson-- don't be afraid of the learning curve of applications that don't use a GUI. The fact is, sometimes the problem space is complicated, and a text interface often handles that complexity better than a GUI. Sure, there's a higher nmemonic load, but we work with these machine every day, so we got used to it. You'd have to give me a really good argument at this point to get me to switch over.

Obligatory MS slam

[Jimbo God of Unix]

To be quite honest, this has been my personal experience with MS software. I've also had problems with various open source software, but at least with OSSs you don't necessarily expect it to be usable "out of the box" and sometimes requires a little fiddling. But with MS stuff you're paying real money for it.

James

Firewall

[jwilhelm]

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.

Re:Firewall

[bernywork]

'Fit for purpose' is defined in Australian law, and is quite often sided on the side of the consumer and not the supplier / manufacturer.

In Aus, it's defined as part of the "Trade practices Act 1974". As the parent rightly said, it's in various consumer rights and various legislatures including the US.

I would turn around and ask for a refund citing as reference all the helpdesk cases you have logged and the fact that it is not working as advertised. I don't think however I would be asking for more. The only option if you want additional compensation I would suggest would be to start a civil suit for recovery of costs. Whether that's worth it or not probably won't be your decision.

Berny

Re:Live and Learn

[Sobrique]

Agreed. If you're both serious about the product and the sale, then run an eval. It takes some effort replicating your production environment, to a level where you can put this product 'in parallel' to see how it copes, but it's worth it, for exactly the reasons outlined above.

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.

It was your decision to purchase

[ip_freely_2000]

"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?

Re:It was your decision to purchase

[Aladrin]

On top of all that, he either totally ignored all the bad reviews for the product, or there were none. If there were no reviews at all, that's a sign in itself, and can be considered a bad review.

So let's assume that mysterious, but very apparently very popular firewall X did indeed have a ton of good reviews. Doesn't that pretty much leave him as an edge-case? Someone who is either using the product as it was not intended, or so incompetent that nothing the company can do will straighten the problem out? The company is probably relying on his 'availability' to troubleshoot because they cannot replicate the problem in their labs.

You took too long

[Overzeetop]

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.

What the market decides.

[Shivetya]

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.