May 1998
An editorial from our webmaster:
A definition: Hubris is a common character flaw in Greek tragedy. It is usually defined as pride, or self-importance. When hubris swells to the height where ones self-importance rivals the gods, as happens in many Greek tragedies, disaster to the individual usually ensues.
In Rome, many an emperor was brought low by hubris. The job of emperor, tends to move ones self opinion upward to great heights. And when you expect the Roman Senate to declare you a god, which wisely enough was done posthumously; it tends to confirm these self-delusions.
The problem: There is a modern equivalent among our corporate giants and, perhaps, our leaders. The hubris of corporate giants takes the form of charging customers for correcting errors that they built into the product. This is common for both hardware and software conglomerates.
A story: A year and a half ago, in New Zealand, I bought a Sony Laser Disk player, that was before DVDs. It has all the bells and whistles. It even claps and cheers for your singing in Karoke mode, just to make you feel better. However not a week after I got the machine it was in the shop for repairs... under warrantee of course; but they couldn't find anything wrong.
Soon after I got the machine I moved from NZ to California, bringing the player with me. After I had been here half a year, the laser disk of Fargo got stuck in the machine. Push the eject button and the player would groan and turn itself off. This made my disk player a Sony Fargo-player, something I would not pay a lot of money for. Singing karoke to Fargo, even with claps and cheers is not much fun either. I can't even make the sound of a wood chipper. I'm not sure a machine like this isn't a copyright violation of some sort. I hope the makers of Fargo go after Sony, not me.
To rectify this situation I trotted off to my local Sony authorized repair center. They have a one-price-fixes-all policy. Even though the machine was less than a year old, since I didn't buy it in the US, it would not be covered by the warrantee. The one price was $150. Now $150 is expensive, but this was a new player and a replacement would cost probably $600, so I coughed up the money. All they did was tighten up the belts. Something that design-wise should not have gone wrong in the first year, maybe after two years of hard playing, but this is a machine I use about once a week.
And I'm supposed to feel grateful. After another month, and another trip to authorized repair center, they discovered a mis-aligned laser-head motion track and some bad solder joints. Let me characterize these problems: the belt problem was probably a dubious design decision, the soldering and mis-alignment were manufacturing accidentals.
Notice the corporate hubris in all this, Sony is charging me to fix something that should never have gone wrong with a well designed and manufactured Sony product in the first place. This policy is sure to gnaw at product reliability. The better the job the marketing people do, and the worse the job design and manufacturing departments do, the more profit the company makes. The attitude that makes this work is that the company can't produce a bad product. A sort of geek equivalent of : "We're Zeus, you know".
This problem doesn't end with Sony. It is common in the software industry, where there tends to be no guarantee or warrantee of any kind.
Another story: As part of my job as webmaster of a small ISP, I teach our clients how to use web creation tools. I recently downloaded a trial version of Adobe PageMill 3.0, a major upgrade to PageMill 2.0. I did this to try and discover what new features it offered, and how well it did fixing the multitude of bugs in PageMill 2.0, which is a common tool in use by our clients.
I was pleasantly surprised at PageMill 3.0. It has added many nice features and incorporated the SiteMill functions missing from PageMill 2.0. However I found a major bug: it wouldn't up-load any files to the website. Now there is no way I can recommend this product if a major flaw like this remains in the product. Clearly uploading worked for Adobe when they debugged the code. There are differences -- our clients do web site development mostly from behind a firewall and then up-load through the firewall to the web server. Another possibility is that Adobe crippled the PageMill 3.0 Trial copy so it wouldn't update sites. However checking the Adobe site showed only the statement that "The trial product will only work for fifteen-days"; this was pretty much confirmed by a advisory window that kept popping up telling me how many days I had left to pay Adobe -- although why I should pay for a product that doesn't work is slightly beyond me.
I tried contacting Adobe by going to their website and looking through the various documents listing bugs and work arounds on the product. Some related to up-load problems, when one only wanted the latest version up-loaded, but I was uploading a new site into a clean fresh new directory. I checked the obvious things: protections were OK, the FTP connection was getting established, log in was successful, and directories were getting created, it was just that files were not be transferred. The PageMill 3.0 log noted "File not uploaded.", something of which I was well aware. It did not give an error code, no FTP response code, nothing much to go on.
I went back to the Adobe site, and tried to explore to find where I was supposed to send problems to Adobe. Very hard to find, clearly Adobe doesn't want to hear from its users, but I eventually found a link that let you mail stuff to the support group. I outlined the problem above and sent it off. Next day I got a semi-automated long response that said they would work on the problem if I wanted to pay for it. As if it were my problem and not their bug. This I found offensive. I wrote a reply that told them to basically get off their ass and support their product.
Now, what could the problem really be. It might be that one manager wanted to cripple the product and another manager wanted only to put in a time limitation. Unknown to both managers both got inserted in the code. The documentation on their website reflecting only the time limitation. Possible, but they certainly shouldn't let their dirty corporate laundry hang out in public. This is the job of the CEO, to keep the company pulling in one direction. Of course, the problem could really be an FTP bug related to the firewall, that they need to resolve. But because they are not talking, I've gotten no response to my second message; it is hard to tell what the problem is.
A third story: Not all companies display this vain pride. On my IBM PC running MS Windows I use Firehand Ember for managing image and sound files. It is a great product. It displays thumbnails of image files in a "Windows Explorer" type display. It allows drag and drop into other applications. A great tool. Every bug I have found in a pre-release version of the code has been eagerly and promptly worked on by the programming staff. Updates to the product are free and I couldn't recommend a better company or product. Let me make it clear I have no association, nor commercial interest in, Firehand Ember or Firehand Technologies Corporation other than as a user. The above recommendation is given freely in support of responsible corporate behavior.
A conclusion: Those companies that do not support their product and attempt to extract money for support from an innocent public, embody the same corporate geek hubris that brought low all those Greek heroes and Roman emperors. I recall two other corporations that displayed this same kind of hubris in the nineteen sixties and early seventies: IBM and Pan Am. Where they are today? IBM is no longer the big player in the computer market. Who cares today what IBM does? Pan Am. Don't ask! It went bankrupt, resurrected, and then lasted about as long as Christ did before he took leave to go to heaven, 40 days if I remember right. It is time that corporate America (and Japan) begin to take responsibility for their products and stop charging consumers for their own errors.
A recommendation: Being a gambler at heart, I suggest that corporations should observe a new consulting/repair policy: Establish a single, not time based, service fee for consulting on a single problem. If an error is due to a failure to follow clearly spelled out directions then the customer should pay the service fee for consulting/repair, say $150, to use Sony's choice. It the error is due to a design or manufacturing defect, or missing or misleading documentation, then the company should pay the customer ten times the service fee. If there is a disagreement as to the cause, have an disinterested consumer group act as judge, jury, and executioner. Thus Sony should have paid me $1500 for the manufacturing errors in my laser disk player, the design problems, incidentally, are just a bad engineering choice and so probably exempt. For design errors every customer that runs into a problem should get paid until a generally available engineering change is available, with maybe a three month grace period for the company to create a free fix. Keeping this payment ratio of 10 to 1, will encourage corporate enterprise to debug before they sell, and at the same time, it will tend to keep repair costs low. I'll bet if this policy were in effect, Sony would only be charging $10/repair not $150. Adobe probably couldn't even afford the $10 service fee. If corporation citizens won't do this voluntarily, why not a law to help them see the light?
BUZ
Webmaster, ServeNet
© 1997 Robert Uzgalis. All Rights Reserved.
P.S. This page was created with PageMill 3.0 and uploaded with PageMill 2.0.