IK Multimedia Tech Support

BobTheDog · Posted: Thu Aug 12, 2010 3:13 am Post subject: IK Multimedia Tech Support

Hi Guys,

This is great, I have Amplitube which is a great sounding plugin but is prone to crashing, so I sent of a stack dump and loads of info to them about the issue.

This is what I got back:

DrJustice · Posted: Thu Aug 12, 2010 4:45 am Post subject:

I have a few thoughts on general software quality, but I'll not get into all of it here.

Suffice to say that the public has been conditioned to accept low quality, with lots of malfunctioning and silly crashes (what I call a defective product). And not only the public; when I worked in certain areas of the software business, the CEOs have had mantras saying "software must have bugs, it' can't not have bugs (we ship when it compiles)", with the non spoken stance that if it hasn't a set of glaring defects, there's something very fishy and the software is not to be trusted. Of course it doesn't help that there are programmers(!) and support personnel who seem totally uninterested in finding and squashing bugs, instead they may suggest a workaround, or pass on the blame to some external factor.

There is obviously a good reason for the style of disclaimers software comes with, like "...not guaranteed to be fit for any purpose whatsoever, blah blah..."

DJ
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BobTheDog · Posted: Fri Aug 13, 2010 9:51 am Post subject:

Here is the next one after I replied saying it was nothing to do with an underpowered machine:

elektro80 · Posted: Fri Aug 13, 2010 10:58 am Post subject:

nobody · Joined: Mar 09, 2008 Posts: 1687 Location: Not here

Don't get me started on tech support. What tech support? Who has tech support? The last company I thought had real tech support - or at least a desire to be helpful - was Gateway in the 90's. The place I worked at had all Gateway desktop machines and every time we needed to call Gateway, they were almost begging us to let them help us. We actually got to know some Gateway techs by name.

Now, nothing, anywhere. I used to have trouble with my Mackie Onyx mixers and while they replaced a Firewire card for me, they're unable to distinguish their tibulas from their fibulas. They had software for daisy-chaining two Onyxs together, which they dropped for their Windows Vista drivers. Lazy! I NEVER use computer tech support, since it's always quickly evident that I can teach them more than they'll ever need to know for their jobs.

I think it's shameful, but to be expected. No one in the corporate world takes pride in their work - and rightfully so. Most of it is crap. It's always the smaller, sometimes mom-and-pop outfits that produce the really cool stuff, and they're naturally willing to fix problems and improve their products, since selling the next model depends on doing so, not to mention they're likely just into what they're doing.

It's why I'm making a big push to stop using Windows as a music workstation at the mo. I'm tired of corporate crap products that either don't work or don't do what I need them to do.