Customer response to WD Team

I’ve recently been paying attention to the Boxee community, its quite a different experience. The CEO of the company has been answering questions on twitter for the last month(!) - the programmers themselves are actively patrolling the AVS forums, asking people to clarify problems, submit examples of items not playing back correctly, explaining what they are working on now, why something might not be implemented, and what will be implemented and how long it might take.
It breeds huge trust and goodwill in customers.
But thats not how WD is - they are this way  - take it or leave it.

I don’t disagree…  But there’s maybe 10 people that work at Boxee between NY and Israel…  :) :slight_smile:  And the other 9 have been telling Avner to pipe down, because he was promising things they couldn’t deliver!  

But I do agree seeing Dan Conti and the others in AVS is refreshing!

Bill_s, thanks for your response.

I think you could save yourself a ton of PM messages and having to read multiple threads like this one by simply adding a sticky thread to the top of this board that DOES NOT allow us to reply in.  In that thread you could give weekly updates on the next firmware release.  Your updates could be as simple as this:

12/15/10:  Engineering is working on the next firmware release for WD TV Live and Plus.  Release date is not known at this time.  The release will contain bug fixes and new features.  Major bugs being looked at include PlayOn and MKV streaming issues.  New features include???.

12/22/10: No new updates.  Check back next week.

12/29/10:  Insert update here.

1 Like

A comparison to other comapnies…

Logitech Harmony 880 remote - To set the time using the buttons on the remote, this is no PM option. So, you have to do it before noon. This bug has been around for at least 4 years. It is acknowledged. No fix yet. You would think this would be something easy to do.

The WDTV unit is a million times more sophisticated and has to interact with countless other devices and setups. For me, I’ve not had any major issues and have taken every available update including betas.

1 Like

RoofingGuy wrote:

 


casm23 wrote:

Am I glad to hear this!  I asked several months ago on multiple occasions that WD’s upper management be made aware of the level of frustration that their customers were experiencing both with the units and WD’s level of communicaton with their userbase.  Would you kindly find out what’s going on with those requests?  I have yet to hear anything one way or the other.

 

Failing that, would you be so kind as to make it official that it’s unrealistic of us to expect any sort of improvement in these areas?  It would save a great deal of frustration over the long term.


 

 

This post from 3 weeks ago? http://community.wdc.com/t5/General-Discussions/Memo-to-WD-this-is-how-to-communicate-with-your-users/m-p/83901#M15932

No, there were three others I was specifically referring to.  Thinking back on it, though, they were almost certainly made in one of the older threads for a specific beta firmware release - so once that release was superseded, the threads were deleted and the posts lost.

bill_s wrote:

 


 

They are well aware of the frustrations, and they are working on fixing what they can.   Btw, I went back seven months, and couldn’t find any messages from you.  To what are you referring concerning requests?  Was it something you posted?

Regarding the old posts, see my reply to RoofingGuy above this one; that should clear up what probably happened there.

That aside, while I appreciate you letting me know that management is well aware of the frustrations their users have, my concern has been that communication to the userbase from WD has been incredibly poor, to say the least.  Without rehashing the events of the past year or so, it’s safe to say that the public-facing responses to the combination of issues that have come up during the beta and release cycles have been compounded by this poor communication.

Here’s the thing: for a good chunk of the userbase, we’re past simple frustration and into outright disillusionment with WD’s approach not only to the device itself but also us as users; speaking from a personal perspective, WD’s approach thus far can perhaps best be described as borderline dismissive.  I’m not aware if you’ve read the thread on the Boxee forums that was referenced earlier in this thread, but the point that I was trying to get across by posting it here is that a little communication goes a long way towards maintaining goodwill with the people who buy the products.  Of course, that also needs to be reflected in WD’s actions subsequent to that communication, which haven’t exactly been fantastic either.

Please note that I’m not intending for any of this to come across as directed at you; it certainly isn’t.  I’ve worked in development before that involves a community component, and realise where you are positioned in all of this.

I believe there IS communication…

With certain users…

As evidenced by the distribution of beta software.

However I also think WD needs to review this approach and be more open with their plans, intentions and progress with addressing problems.

If I was a user with limited tech knowledge and normal consumer expectations who purchased the WDTV Live and then Playon  I might be inclined to burn down the forum after the last official firmware update.

Imagine the poor souls who have the unit and Playon and have no idea what the real problem is and no real technical inclination…they may have just accepted the upgrade and now are wondering what hit them.

Same for anyone who just upgraded expecting a solid improvement and who is victim of the other problems with the upgrade.

I bet there are a lot of people out there who blindly accepted an upgrade and do not even know about this forum wondering what  hit them…

Regarding the moderator(s).

They might just be caught between the rocks and a stinky place…

The system shows a typical disconnect between the “professionals” and the “technicals”  .

Poor business…

Of course this leads to lack of faith on the part of consumers for the brand but if there is a proliferation of and variety of merchandsie and with some major successes all will be forgotten or forgiven…yeah, maybe…

Nehptis wrote:

Bill_s, thanks for your response.

 

I think you could save yourself a ton of PM messages and having to read multiple threads like this one by simply adding a sticky thread to the top of this board that DOES NOT allow us to reply in.  In that thread you could give weekly updates on the next firmware release.  Your updates could be as simple as this:

 

12/15/10:  Engineering is working on the next firmware release for WD TV Live and Plus.  Release date is not known at this time.  The release will contain bug fixes and new features.  Major bugs being looked at include PlayOn and MKV streaming issues.  New features include???.

 

12/22/10: No new updates.  Check back next week.

 

12/29/10:  Insert update here.

 

Unfortunately and like I said earlier, I can’t speak for the product people.  I doubt it very much that we will ever talk about what new features we will be adding - unless of course it gets accepted in the Ideas Lab.  And, some of the obvious issues that were generated from an update, I’m sure we will work to fix.  But more than half of what you call bugs, we still have to replicate first, before we can even think about fixing.  That all will take time - which I know stinks.  That’s why it seems like nothing is going on, but we are working on it. 

Now, I do agree that it would be nice if we maintain some kind of update for you, and I will see what we can do about it.  But the reason I don’t respond is simply because I don’t know any more than you do.  And, when I have nothing to say, I tend to just move on.  Nonetheless, I will see what can be done about this.

1 Like

dosborne wrote:

A comparison to other comapnies…

 

Logitech Harmony 880 remote - To set the time using the buttons on the remote, this is no PM option. So, you have to do it before noon. This bug has been around for at least 4 years. It is acknowledged. No fix yet.

doch. Use metric system like normal people do. If you already know how to count to 12 you need only a little practice to start counting to 24

casm23 wrote:

 

Here’s the thing: for a good chunk of the userbase, we’re past simple frustration and into outright disillusionment with WD’s approach not only to the device itself but also us as users; speaking from a personal perspective, WD’s approach thus far can perhaps best be described as borderline dismissive.  I’m not aware if you’ve read the thread on the Boxee forums that was referenced earlier in this thread, but the point that I was trying to get across by posting it here is that a little communication goes a long way towards maintaining goodwill with the people who buy the products.  Of course, that also needs to be reflected in WD’s actions subsequent to that communication, which haven’t exactly been fantastic either.

 

Please note that I’m not intending for any of this to come across as directed at you; it certainly isn’t.  I’ve worked in development before that involves a community component, and realise where you are positioned in all of this.

I’m sorry, I wasn’t ignoring you.  I somehow missed your post the first time around. 

I totally agree that we need to be more transparent, but how much and by whom, we’re still working on that.  I think that as this community becomes more and more entrenched in our corporate customer awareness, you will see much more communication.  And I know for a fact, that we are becoming more and more aware of this community.  But understand, what seems like a lack of response, is not because we think lightly of our customers.  We are working hard to make our products as good as we can.  But these things take time, and we may just need to do more to keep you in the loop on that. 

3 Likes

casm23 wrote:

That aside, while I appreciate you letting me know that management is well aware of the frustrations their users have, my concern has been that communication to the userbase from WD has been incredibly poor, to say the least.  Without rehashing the events of the past year or so, it’s safe to say that the public-facing responses to the combination of issues that have come up during the beta and release cycles have been compounded by this poor communication.

Agreed. I’m not blaming Bill_S but someone at WD should get their act together and take another approach. Was it really that hard to tell people why the WD TV would not support DVD menus? On the AVS forums and elsewhere we speculated it might be technical difficulties, I dismissed the idea it was licensing issues because cheaper players supported them but up to this day we don’t know why.

bill_s wrote:
We are working hard to make our products as good as we can.

Right, but how come some things are completely ignored ( german localization errors!) despite free help from the community or made deliberately worse? I’ve been complaining about transparent subtitle outlines in SRT files since day one and not only haven’t they been fixed, I still don’t know why it was done in the first place.  Did someone at Sigma think of it as a good idea or something?

I think the real problem here is that there are only moderators here. Not actual WD support people.

If the moderators have any chance of influencing WD this might be a good way. Get some support people here and also some technical people. The WD Product Manager for the WDTV family would also be a good thing.

What WD must understand is that today consumer electronics companies need to either bring out a near-perfect product that just works for everyone OR start to interact with their userbase. Since the first option is very hard if not impossible, they need to go for the interaction. And hosting a forum with some moderators is not interacting.

I agree with your comment.  I bought this based on the 1080p using mkv.  Fix the issues that are related to the box and stop spending time upgrading items like “Flingo” and FB.

1 Like