Re: Special upgrade treatment

CWCunningham wrote:
Could you please isolate in my original post, the line or lines which strike you as "harsh comments", and then explain why you would think so? I'm sure after you read it and mull it over for a few minutes, you'll see that it was as positive as you might hope from a dissatisfied customer... even advertised the extension to your very tempting upgrade offer.

"Chuck Baker" <chuck_baker@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:42D13672.1080802@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
| CWCunningham wrote:
|

50% of the upgrades I've gotten from Newtek, *should not be installed* according
to Newtek.

|| Your original comment did not suggest a specific range of releases.
| Thank you for clarifying your intent.
|
It was merely a statement of fact directed at someone else, but since you question it, I'll gladly defend that statement.

First, instead of 50%, it should read 66.66% since 7.5 was not an upgrade, but a $1500 event.
B as you know was pulled.
C was still not what I will call my money's worth.
And D, though still available on the website, is broken in a way that makes it useless to myself and many others. If you search through this newsgroup, or google "LW 7.5 D morph mixer problems - HELP", you will find a request to confirm a bug in 7.5d, and your support department's "workaround", to wit, "... they said flat out, 'do not run 7.5d'"


| Yes, we withdrew one update in
| that series.  If technical support is recommending against any other
| updates in that series or in any wider selected range of update
| versions, then by all means I'd like to know about it, and I'd like to
| know why.
|
And there you have it.

| If you personally would recommend against any updates in that
| series, or any other updates for that matter, then again, I am
| interested in finding out why you feel those particular updates should
| be avoided.  If you'd prefer to discuss this in email, that would be
| fine with me.
|
I think we should keep this very public.


That was my preference, or I would have just emailed you, CW.

Newtek's attitude towards dissatisfied customers, and the quality of LW releases is of public interest. I would have appreciated this thread before I plonked down my hard earned cash, and I intend to pay very close attention before I plonk down any more.

| This is certainly information that should get through to
| management and the development team.
|
I couldn't agree more, but now look at it from my perspective. The fact that 7.5d is unusable in the eyes of your support department is a matter of public record in this newsgroup, and yet here you are, in the same newsgroup, focusing on what ... harshness? If your company is unaware of what your support department is telling customers, is that our responsibility? Who could possibly turn this around? (My money's on you, and I hope I'm pushing you in that direction).


I was focused on gaining the specifics of your issues so that I could get that information to the appropriate parties here. Apologies if any ancillary comments made you feel otherwise.


Some time back, you and I had a discussion along these lines
YOU: "... do you think we should pull programmers off of new work to deal with bug reports?"
ME: "No ... but let's not be too hasty"

Well today, I'm changing my tune, *Absolutely* you should pull programmers from new content to deal with bugs, over the course of a year you would see unhappy customers, and your bug backlog dry up. I guarantee it. During my decades in programming, my policy has been to encourage bug reports to come to me directly and immediately, and I've taken pride in turning them within the hour. 1 hour doesn't even dent my ability to turn out new content, and my customers have never been unhappy for more than an hour. It works miracles and you should try it. ... if your developers have their trash put right on their desk until they get it right ... they will get used to the customer friendly notion of getting it right before it leaves, and doing it even better should it ever return.

If you have programmers who find releasable code a burden on their time, the last thing you should do is give them new work ... do it well or don't bother valuable customers with it.

Our programmers are dedicated to providing a quality product, and the current team has made eradicating bugs the priority for the 8.x cycle. They list the fixes in each release, so folks can get a look at just how committed they are to fixes by viewing the 8.x update download pages on the web site.



| > Would you like to talk 8.3?
|
| If you are encountering problems with 8.3 then indeed you should report
| those problems. Whether you chose to do so here, or via our support
| services, if you are having issues we'd like to help get them addressed.
|
I'm not buying the 8.x releases, though the $250 offer did merit a "take it or leave it" coin toss. Your own forums paint the picture vividly enough for my tastes. I can't add to what you could easily learn from your own forums, but I will add that an associate of Newtek's (who shall remain nameless) suggested that I upgrade, but "don't install 8.3". I didn't do either. It would be interesting to have a recent copy just so I could see if long standing flaws are still extant, I'm certainly not going to pay for the privelege.

| > As for the free support being worth every penny, would you like to swap war
| > stories?
|
| Again, if you have issues with our support services, you have a choice
| of either making mysterious innuendos or specific comments here, as you
| wish, or you can always email me specifics and I'll direct your reports
| to the management responsible for our support services.
|
Mysterious Innuendos !!! Have you forgotten our discussions on this very subject sometime back in this very newsgroup? You insisted that my 5 month old suppoprt request was probably not recieved and that I should resubmit? I did so, cc'ing you. I recieved a response from, *not* my resubmission, but my 5 month old request. I saw to it you were cc'd the entire sequence of mailings that ensued, did I recieve anything you would call helpful? I gave them an explicit error message, but that was not enough to submit to a programmer!!! (Give me your code and 5 minutes and I'll show you the code that generated the error).

But hey ... if you are really willing to help ... I've got an issue outstanding with your support department that I'm still hoping will be resolved. It's 25 months old, will you help me?

As you can see, I'm not a satisfied customer, which is sad, because I'm easily satisfied. I merely expect 7.5 to work as documented, that's what I paid for and that's all I ask. I understand that bugs are inevitable, but I also know from experience that they are easily dealt with. It's up to you.



Thank you for the additional specifics - I will get those to the appropriate people here. Please note that when you say that "7.5d is broken in a way that I and many others cannot use it" - that's the kind of remark I referred to as a "mysterious innuendo" - if you say something is bad, and don't say why, I can pass your assessment along but without specifics whatever the problem is is not going to get addressed. If you have specifics, then that's what I need in order to provide management and development something they can act on. While there will be no further work in the 7.5 cycle, bugs present in those editions can be eliminated in the 8.x series if reported.




--

=========================================
Chuck Baker -- NewTek, Inc.
Senior Director  of Corporate Communications
http://www.newtek.com/
=========================================
.

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