liam@cs.qmw.ac.uk (William Roberts;) (05/28/91)
In <13673@goofy.Apple.COM> ksand@apple.com (Kent Sandvik) writes: >In general MacDTS works with registered developer questions, so most of our resources >are working on those questions of natural reasons (they pay for the service, so they >get the major service). Also most of our registered developers are working on >important software packages, and as working for a software company everyone >knows that quick response is very important, especially in times such as these >when time-to-market dictates how much you earn. Uk.DTS is perhaps something of a special case, since the people involved were a separate A/UX support organisation prior to taking on DTS as well. Technical A/UX questions address to Apple UK or most UK Apple dealers will just get passed on to them anyway, so we cut out the "chinese whispers" and go direct. Remember that Apple on the continental USA is a very different thing from Apple out in the rest of the world. >Anyway, reports@aux.support.com is maybe the most logical place for sending bug >reports. Unfortunately they can't acknowledge every posted bug report, mostly due >to resource limitations as well. I should like to point out here that i have *never*, *ever* received an unsolicited acknowledgement to an SPR sent to reports.aux.support.apple.com. To get acknowledgements I had to put in a comment to the effect "I am totally &#$#!-off with A/UX Beta-N and unless you people start acknowledging these bug reports I am going to stop bothering". This is normally good for a message of the form "No, no - please keep sending in your bug reports", which at least acts as proof that messages are getting through. There was a period of several weeks in which all messages to aux.support.apple.com were bounced back by that machine after some mixup with the mail system: after pointing this out to postmaster@apple.com, I got back a suggestion that I should FTP the latest version of sendmail for my system.... >This newsgroup is a great way to make use of the extended A/UX knowledge out there in the >field. Originally Usenet was the feeding ground and inofficial support channel for >UNIX, and hopefully we could continue to use this newgroup for any kind of one-to-many >support. >Regards, >Kent Sandvik, Flatworms Group, DTS Lots of Apple people are very helpful about answering messages and problems raised on this newsgroup. Lots more Apple people are fixing the bugs that I (and presumably others) have reported. What is deeply bizarre is that no attempt ever seems to be made to tell us that our bugs have been fixed! This is very bad customer management for the following reasons: 1) It is discouraging to beta testers and diligent customers, because it tends to suggest that Apple doesn't care. Beta testing is not fun, and sending bug reports into a black hole doesn't make it any better. 2) It does nothing to boost confidence in the product - if you don't have time to tell me that you've fixed things then I have to test new releases myself to see if the bugs are still there. If I don't have the time to do so then I just assume that none of the bugs have been fixed... 3) It wastes customer goodwill and resources. Even judging from recent postings, there are a lot of A/UX customers who have a wider and detailed knowledge of things like NFS, and who are more than willing to help track down problems, experiment with possible solutions etc. You should be making more use of us! It seems to me to be an extremely cost-effective exercise to introduce the following small changes to whatever procedures you currently have: a) When a bug report is accepted or identified as another instance of an known bug, tag it with the email address of the sender (there may be several different senders) and MAIL THE SENDER to let them know what happened. If you can't reproduce the bug, tell me and maybe I'll try harder myself. b) When a bug gets fixed and signed off, TELL THE INTERESTED PEOPLE that it has been fixed and which release the fix is in. Details aren't really necessary, just bug title.summary and a release number. Other people can do this (e.g. Sequent), why can't Apple? -- William Roberts Internet: liam@dcs.qmw.ac.uk Queen Mary & Westfield College UUCP: liam@qmw-dcs.UUCP Mile End Road AppleLink: UK0087 LONDON, E1 4NS, UK Tel: +44 71-975 5234 (Fax: +44 81-980 6533)
dittman@skitzo.csc.ti.com (05/29/91)
In article <3106@redstar.cs.qmw.ac.uk>, liam@cs.qmw.ac.uk (William Roberts;) writes: > Lots of Apple people are very helpful about answering messages and problems > raised on this newsgroup. Lots more Apple people are fixing the bugs that I > (and presumably others) have reported. What is deeply bizarre is that no > attempt ever seems to be made to tell us that our bugs have been fixed! This isn't quite true. I reported a problem with 2.0.0 and received a message that the problem was going to be fixed in the next release. I found the problem was fixed in 2.0.1. Granted the problem wasn't a big one (just a documentation problem), I still got notified, and the problem was fixed. -- Eric Dittman Texas Instruments - Component Test Facility dittman@skitzo.csc.ti.com dittman@skbat.csc.ti.com Disclaimer: I don't speak for Texas Instruments or the Component Test Facility. I don't even speak for myself.