"Sometimes it's not our fault" :what do you think?

[vigilante]

Let me start off by saying that I'm not a whiner by any means and that one of my greatest joys is seeing something break so I can spend time fixing it. But, when a problem manifests itself to the point where the issues are not just isolated to the technically inept or unlucky few, it would seem that those parties involved should take strides to address and resolve them without regards to corporate reputation. I've noticed a disturbing trend that involves the major hardware manufactures attempting to mitigate customer service issues by denying the existence of product defects, blaming inherent faults on mis-configuration, user error or incompatibility (which in many cases is in fact true).

I've grown tired of waiting for problems to be fixed "In the next release". What happens to those unfortunate people that have "The previous revision?" Never in past years have I had to return as many NEW items as I have lately. As a matter of fact, when I built my last system I was forced to return the Motherboard (twice for USB issues), the Sound Card and a DVD-Drive. This is totally unacceptable. In my professional life I'm an IT Integrator. I spend all day, every day evaluating the latest and greatest items for compatibility, performance, reliability, etc. This failure trend has reared its ugly head in almost every consumer product category.

In the days of old, a product was actually thoroughly tested including alphas and betas prior to introduction in the marketplace. Not a new concept, just one that was taken more seriously then. Known issues were resolved BEFORE release, and any faults that surfaced after public release was quickly addressed and resolved. In a nutshell, Companies took responsibility for their products and genuinely cared for their customers. This implies all customers, not just satisfying their corporate contractual obligations.

In my opinion, it's this rush to be the first to marketplace with the latest feature-laden product. Acknowledging hardware defects would not harm your reputation. Resolving them to the "Customers" satisfaction quickly and effectively would only strengthen your grip with those that keep you in business, US! I could post a hundred links to a hundred forums with hundreds of people experiencing the same problems. Yet these are never addressed by those that are responsible for correcting them. In fact, certain Companies, which shall go unnamed have went so far as to imply that I was incompetent, that I could not follow directions and that they had no record of these issues occurring on such a mass scale (and for the record, no it was not VIA).

Like I said, sometimes it's just not our fault...

---DVRoss
http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.cfm?catid=12&threadid=8596

[d4n13l]

The same can also be said for software.