corporate
How to loose customers and aggravate people
For the last few days I fell into the hellish world that is Creative Technology and their sound cards.
Even just doing a cursory search you find the pain that this company has put its customers through, namely bad drivers, updated drivers removing features original included in the product and shutting down attempts to rectify failures in their drivers.
Such horror stories include:
- failing to release drivers for Vista until 6 months or so after the release of Vista. Then when a user creates their own, fully Vista-compliant drivers before Creative do, they pile on loads of pressure and force the guy to stop development,
- releasing updated drivers to their sound card range that actually removes Dolby and DTS decoding, after advertising it as a feature of the original card,
- having various varients (via S/N) of the same product that have different features turned on and off, leaving it down to a S/N lottery for the user and never telling them.
So, after toying with the idea of updating my soundcard to be able to decode my PS3’s optical output, I realised the error of my ways and went for this excellent surround sound speaker setup that includes digital decoding built in.
Nice one Creative. I am sure their products are fine for the average user, but for anyone who is expecting anything more than average use might find they run into a whole heap of pain.