Ask Slashdot: Tech Customers Forced Into Supporting Each Other? 253
An anonymous reader writes "Has anyone else noticed the trend towards 'community forums' where customers are basically being recruited to solve the issues of other customers while the companies selling the products causing the issues sit back and take a passive role in the process? Granted, sometimes the companies' employees play an active part in the forums and provide some value-add by contributing crucial, and often undocumented, knowledge that solves the problem in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, that isn't always the case, and this leaves customers with no visibility into whether or not their problems are being addressed, and, if they are, when they might expect to receive assistance. This is bad enough when dealing with consumer electronics that cost up to a couple of hundred of dollars, but it's completely unacceptable when dealing with proprietary design tool vendors that are charging several thousand dollars for software licenses for tools that are the only option if a customer doesn't want to drop an order of magnitude more money to go with 3rd party tools (e.g., Synopsys). Who do you think are the worst offenders of this downloading of support onto the backs of the customers themselves, and what can be done about it?"
Re:To be fair... (Score:4, Funny)
Whyd you shift "the" a bit to the left?
Re:3D studio max (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like you had an unsupported graphics card.
A lot of these programs have a "supported configs" list. Very often they will involve workstation graphics cards, which have a different set of drivers which the software is targetted at. That would explain why theyre giving you a hard time: you're not meeting their minimum supported configuration, and then complaining that they arent supporting it.
Forgive me for not mentioning all the other details, like the brand of my motherboard, my graphics card (which FYI was supported, it was a professional Nvidia Quadro card and very much supported, with the proper drivers even.) We even ran it in software mode, same errors. Do you honestly thing I would be stupid enough not to try SOFTWARE RENDERING instead of Direct3D or OpenGL to test for the bugs we had for 6 months?) No offense dude, but get off my lawn.