46 ms·

It also won't happen at this point, ever. Is there anything we can do to help you revisit this decision?

qubex 7y ago
Nope, too late. The decision was made and orders have been placed. You don’t get do-overs, sorry. I might still get a machine for my own amusement, but... I don’t know, reading of some poor guy left dangling for best part of a year just doesn’t build confidence and leaves me with a “there but for the Grace of God go I” feeling, you understand?
- tpearson-raptor 7y ago
  I understand. I also know this happened to no one else, and it was a pathological case in a support system that has since been completely overhauled. This is one reason why we started the self-serve RMA process -- to show that yes, we are committed to replacing defective hardware in a timely fashion. If the machine is defective, and we can't help via our online troubleshooting guide and Email / phone support, send it right back for replacement. That being said, the assembled systems products are checked with a significant burn-in test etc. before they ship. We have never had an assembled system arrive defective anywhere, except if it was damaged in shipping (i.e. crushed box etc.).
  - qubex 7y ago
    I’m not trying to guilt-trip you or anything... I really like the idea of having non-monoculture machines and I’ve always been a sucker for unusual hardware (NeXT, BeBox, IBM RS/6000, dual Pentium machines to name but a few)... but if the one prominent story I find online is about a poor guy who is left to cry his eyes out regretting his courageous and expensive decision while the company that supplied him is apparently indifferent (this was before the happy if belated epilogue) it’s just an instant turn-off as far as I’m concerned. You’re producing something unusual and new, and users take a risk and pay far above market prices for the privilege to be on the bleeding edge... the least one can expect is competent and timely technical support. This poor guy went through “please reinstall your OS”-level indifference for months. That’s not the way one builds confidence. And yeah, I’m glad you’ve revised your policies, but in my particular case it came too late. This guy bought a Ferrari-analogue and got a Trabant with Lada-level tech support. He’s been pretty polite in writing up a follow-up detailing your company’s long-overdue resolution of his issues. I doubt he’s asked you to refund you the months of lost productivity and the time he spent essentially volunteering his time to serve as a free engineering consultant. That’s just not good enough. Somebody should’ve swooped in before this poor guy became so frustrated he wrote it up and submitted it to HackerNews. No DRM, full-ownership computing is great, and the performance is literally astounding (particularly for our use-case), but at the time the decision was made, based on the evidence I had, the decision was clear. I do not regret deciding not to buy your product because based on the data available to me at the time as far as I knew I would’ve been alone and/or I would have spent a fortune sending faulty items back-and-forth through customs, paying import duty each time. Whoever decided not to be proactive in this guy’s case procured your firm a sizeable amount of bad publicity. Not to mention that the team I am part of would’ve probably, as a side-effect of the proprietary software we are developing, also contributed various patches and so forth to various parts of the underlying open-source stack.
    - tpearson-raptor 7y ago
      No problem, I understand. In your shoes I may have even done the same thing. Just in case you didn't see them (they're not exactly easy to find with Google etc. for some reason), there are a number of positive reviews or comments online from various people. I know one thing we haven't (yet) done is to start assembling all the success stories around our hardware; this is always challenging due to the number of people that use the hardware without posting online for privacy reasons etc. Without further ado: Slightly out of date (the software now available for POWER is significantly more robust than it was at the time -- we even have Fedora desktop ISOs showing up now for POWER): http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-semi-review-of-raptor-talos-ii.html http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-semi-review-of-rapt... Various other (more recent) comments from our user base: https://twitter.com/RobinBa40108750/status/1179078295981363203 https://twitter.com/RobinBa40108750/status/11790782959813632... https://twitter.com/tsundeoku/status/1171414555089494016 https://twitter.com/tsundeoku/status/1171414555089494016 https://twitter.com/alnesbit/status/1170425263559254017 https://twitter.com/alnesbit/status/1170425263559254017 https://twitter.com/klauskiwi/status/1164273128588972032 https://twitter.com/klauskiwi/status/1164273128588972032 https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1161438996586803200 https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1161438996586803200 https://mastodon.sdf.org/@jirka/102520125253219962 https://mastodon.sdf.org/@jirka/102520125253219962 Just wanted to show a little bit of the other side of things, for context. :)
    - jacques_chester 7y ago
      I think the point is well-made and flogging it doesn't really add much. Raptor can't change what happened, only what happens next.

Nope, too late. The decision was made and orders have been placed. You don’t get do-overs, sorry. I might still get a machine for my own amusement, but... I don’t know, reading of some poor guy left dangling for best part of a year just doesn’t build confidence and leaves me with a “there but for the Grace of God go I” feeling, you understand?

tpearson-raptor 7y ago
I understand. I also know this happened to no one else, and it was a pathological case in a support system that has since been completely overhauled. This is one reason why we started the self-serve RMA process -- to show that yes, we are committed to replacing defective hardware in a timely fashion. If the machine is defective, and we can't help via our online troubleshooting guide and Email / phone support, send it right back for replacement. That being said, the assembled systems products are checked with a significant burn-in test etc. before they ship. We have never had an assembled system arrive defective anywhere, except if it was damaged in shipping (i.e. crushed box etc.).
- qubex 7y ago
  I’m not trying to guilt-trip you or anything... I really like the idea of having non-monoculture machines and I’ve always been a sucker for unusual hardware (NeXT, BeBox, IBM RS/6000, dual Pentium machines to name but a few)... but if the one prominent story I find online is about a poor guy who is left to cry his eyes out regretting his courageous and expensive decision while the company that supplied him is apparently indifferent (this was before the happy if belated epilogue) it’s just an instant turn-off as far as I’m concerned. You’re producing something unusual and new, and users take a risk and pay far above market prices for the privilege to be on the bleeding edge... the least one can expect is competent and timely technical support. This poor guy went through “please reinstall your OS”-level indifference for months. That’s not the way one builds confidence. And yeah, I’m glad you’ve revised your policies, but in my particular case it came too late. This guy bought a Ferrari-analogue and got a Trabant with Lada-level tech support. He’s been pretty polite in writing up a follow-up detailing your company’s long-overdue resolution of his issues. I doubt he’s asked you to refund you the months of lost productivity and the time he spent essentially volunteering his time to serve as a free engineering consultant. That’s just not good enough. Somebody should’ve swooped in before this poor guy became so frustrated he wrote it up and submitted it to HackerNews. No DRM, full-ownership computing is great, and the performance is literally astounding (particularly for our use-case), but at the time the decision was made, based on the evidence I had, the decision was clear. I do not regret deciding not to buy your product because based on the data available to me at the time as far as I knew I would’ve been alone and/or I would have spent a fortune sending faulty items back-and-forth through customs, paying import duty each time. Whoever decided not to be proactive in this guy’s case procured your firm a sizeable amount of bad publicity. Not to mention that the team I am part of would’ve probably, as a side-effect of the proprietary software we are developing, also contributed various patches and so forth to various parts of the underlying open-source stack.
  - tpearson-raptor 7y ago
    No problem, I understand. In your shoes I may have even done the same thing. Just in case you didn't see them (they're not exactly easy to find with Google etc. for some reason), there are a number of positive reviews or comments online from various people. I know one thing we haven't (yet) done is to start assembling all the success stories around our hardware; this is always challenging due to the number of people that use the hardware without posting online for privacy reasons etc. Without further ado: Slightly out of date (the software now available for POWER is significantly more robust than it was at the time -- we even have Fedora desktop ISOs showing up now for POWER): http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-semi-review-of-raptor-talos-ii.html http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-semi-review-of-rapt... Various other (more recent) comments from our user base: https://twitter.com/RobinBa40108750/status/1179078295981363203 https://twitter.com/RobinBa40108750/status/11790782959813632... https://twitter.com/tsundeoku/status/1171414555089494016 https://twitter.com/tsundeoku/status/1171414555089494016 https://twitter.com/alnesbit/status/1170425263559254017 https://twitter.com/alnesbit/status/1170425263559254017 https://twitter.com/klauskiwi/status/1164273128588972032 https://twitter.com/klauskiwi/status/1164273128588972032 https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1161438996586803200 https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1161438996586803200 https://mastodon.sdf.org/@jirka/102520125253219962 https://mastodon.sdf.org/@jirka/102520125253219962 Just wanted to show a little bit of the other side of things, for context. :)
  - jacques_chester 7y ago
    I think the point is well-made and flogging it doesn't really add much. Raptor can't change what happened, only what happens next.