Ralph Clark wrote:
I have a lot of sympathy for this view and I hate it when people complain about not getting value for money when they only spent 40 bucks.
I do to. It doesn't matter really what the price was. $40, or $4000. It is simply an issue of delivering as promised. If SuSE is silly enough to promise 60 day installation support for $60, that is they should deliver on that promise. If I sell my car for $2000, and promise to repair any problems for the next two years. Then it isn't fair or legal, to later claim that it is TOO expensive to address major mechanical problems, and that my warrantee is limited only to providing emergency jump starts if the car is towed to my apartment first. And it is definitely not legal or moral then continue to try and sell a second car for $2000 and make the same promise. The people I've spoken to at SuSE understand that, and admit they are trying to fix the problem. I don't understand why some of the readers of this list don't. Reasonable installation support, means at the very minimum every message is replied to. In 950f the cases the message could be one of the following: - We are sorry, your request goes beyond our standard installation. Support. Your system is up and running, and your YaST upgrades are working. We don't write package X.rpm ourselves, but merely act as an agent for delivering the package to you. We suggest you contact x@y.z as he is the current maintainer of this package according to the LSM. - We are sorry, but we can't find your registration in our database. Please try registering again at: http://... - You have seemed to have stumped our installation support department. If we eventually find an answer we will let you know. Otherwise you may wish to contact sales@suse.com for information on returning our product. We are sorry this didn't seem to work out for you. - FAQ #xxx seems to answer your question. If not, please send us further details about your problem. - Thanks for your input. We will consider incorporating your ideas into our next release. - No, we don't want easy money, and we won't send your message to 15 of our friends. Bill
OTOH, people like myself who are prepared to RTFM and search the list archives and the web for answers and even experiment to a degree sometimes still end up with no other recourse but to report the fault to the distributor and ask for their help. Given all the work you've put in by that point, it is extremely disturbing to find either that you are being completely ignored or that you are being given the brush off because they won't support the system once you've compiled your own kernel. For $40 we can expect only a limited amount of support, but some of us aren't even getting that. When you've taken the time to investigate the problem thoroughly and have documented it all for them with example input and output etc. it's only fair to expect a slightly more co-operative response. After all in doing this we are helping them to refine their product.
SuSE must be prepared to stand behind their product if they expect to retain any credibility. If that means they have to charge a little more then so be it. But the current policy is certain to lose them customers. I for one will be looking very carefully at the support angle from now on when choosing distributions.
-- rclark@virgosolutions.demon.co.uk Ralph Clark, Virgo Solutions Ltd (UK) __ _ / / (_)__ __ ____ __ * Powerful * Flexible * Compatible * Reliable * / /__/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / *Well Supported * Thousands of New Users Every Day* /____/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ The Cost Effective Choice - Linux Means Business!
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