Re: How does one reach the developers of Virtual PC at MS

From: Steve Jain (essjae-No_at_Spam-hotmail.com)
Date: 03/17/05 

Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 17:02:35 -0800

comments in line below :-)

On 16 Mar 2005 07:16:57 -0800, "Len" <spam@md-jobs.com> wrote:

>Dear Steve,
>
>After reading your considered opinions, I'm left with the feeling that
>I've been lectured to about the proper etiquette of contacting those
>responsible for providing commercially (at significant cost) a
>defective product.

Sorry if you've felt lectured to, but I've been in and around the
computer support industry for a long, long, long time and 99% of the
times when someone begins with a similar story to yours, they're
usually barely able to turn on their computer and work with technical
support, let alone waste a developer's time. I'm not trying to talk
down to you or insult you, but as I said a developer's job isn't to
provide support for a product, if they did, there would be no
development.

>
>I'm in my fifties, hold a graduate degree and am President of a
>successful business, perhaps that's why I'm uncomfortable with your
>response. I'm accustomed to problems being solved quickly by
>responsible people.
>
>In addition to the garmin software, which is recreational for me and
>not really that important, we utilize disks and software in my
>corporate environment that is critical to my business. That software,
>which worked well in all previous versions of VPC for mac, won't even
>load with the new program. Crashes and generates the report
Running on OS 9 or X, X introduced a lot of issues with USB,
regardless of the VPC version.

As unseelie mentioned, the Garmin issues are well known ( even to the
developers ) and have been a problem with VPC and OS X for quite some
time.

>
>My point is, either they are working to refine it, or they are unable
>to perfect it. I personally think that windows is a huge waste of time
>and a very poor emulation of the mac operating system. However, as you
>know, if you are a mac user, there is no fighting ignorance within the
>PC community and end users like you and me have little to no influence
>on the profit motive fights between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
Not the MS stole it from Apple thing again...
I am both a PC and Mac user, and I ALSO know that there is also no
hope of fighting the elitism of a good portion of the Mac community(as
well as their ignorance and gullibility to believe whatever Jobs
says). But that's way off-topic for this newsgroup.

>
>Bottom line is that I am willing to work with these developers to help
>solve glitches but I have no way to relay that information. I'm not
>angry, I'm just very disappointed in the product. It should have been
>obvious when they delayed the roll out of the VPC program beyond when
>Office came out (which was supposed to include VPC as part of the
>overall set) that they were having problems.

Ok, that said, have you posted the details of your problems here? I
KNOW there are MS employees and others with direct access to MS
employees in various positions that read this newsgroup and report
issues to them.

Can you start (or restart) a new thread for the specific problems and
applications that you're experiencing? If they worked in previous
versions of VPC, include that info too.

>To answer your other questions, yes I've spent my share of time with
>the folks at VPC tech support. the first one I spoke to had no idea
>how to resolve the problems - I'm convinced he'd never even seen a mac.
> Subsequent conversations haved resulted in the mutual agreement that
>the difficulties with programs not working properly or crashing are
>just beyond the scope of technical support to resolve. Meaning
>problems with the basic program

Yes, its unfortunate, but it does seem that some of the VPC support
staff is not as knowledgable as others...its hard to keep a good
support staff, once they get enough knowledge they move on to a better
position where they don't get insulted and cursed at.

>
>Thanks for your discussion, I AM grateful you took the time to write.
>

No problem. Thanks for writing back. I'm sorry my tone was
insulting, I know that sometimes my posts can seem course.

But, please do start a new thread or threads with the details of the
problems you're experiencing and hopefully there is some kind of
work-around or solution possible.

  

-- 
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP 
Website: http://www.essjae.com
"This posting is provided "AS IS" with 
no warranties, and confers no rights. 
You assume all risk for your use."

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