Oh yes. I shall say it. Customer service blows, but not in the way you may be thinking. No, not at the moment.... You see, while plenty of customers must deal with the potential bad mouth on the other end of things, it is that other end of things that I will be speaking of.
Having worked retail, I now have a complete understanding of how it feels to deal with the normal every day person, the weirdo, the psycho, and the plain rude and grumpy who also just happen to be pompous and self righteous. So allow me to tie this into Free and Open Source Software today.
KDE 4
I keep reading of the complaints of the blasted thing not being ready. I am perfectly happy with 3.5 and the derivatives, so I shall stick to it for the time being. Some have compared it to Vista. Another has suggested a fork. So what happens when one person shows their frustration as a volunteer developer?
For starters, an individual by the name of "Allan" states the following:
I've been looking forward to 4.1 and gave various 4.0.x releases a go and have even defended KDE4 on Ubuntu forums. But if your post is indicative of the attitude of KDE developers then I will just walk away.
Take a gander at this gem from an individual identifying themselves as "Flar":
So a big thank you to all KDE Developer who made KDE such a big success in the past, but shame on them who are thinking users of KDE are not important for a Project like KDE.
I can completely understand how the individual in question feels. As someone who has to deal with customers you can only smile. You can never, ever be in a bad mood, and most importantly, you can not speak your mind in order for the person staring back at you to understand what you happen to be going through at the moment. Oh no, we are not allowed to talk back ever, and when we do, the other people act like the ungrateful jerks they are.
In other words, the people using the software itself often do not understand the process of software development in any shape or form. I was barely able to do Java a couple semesters ago. I do not have the patience for software development on a regular basis. I get frustrated too easily. However, the people who decide to develop on a regular basis should be treated with a little bit of respect as far as I am concerned. For those who think I am stupid for defending Troy at KDE, then you might want to take a timeout and read this.
So why did I point to a blog entry from helios himself? To make a point, especially one I already made earlier. In a previous entry, Pushing the Glacier, I asked a very hard question about those who sing the praises of FOSS itself, yet they do nothing except sit behind the keyboard all day long. I am talking more than passing out CD's and DVD's. I am talking about helping projects in a constructive manner through bug reports, donations, translation, and most importantly, marketing!
Folks, something big is coming. Very big. If you think for one second that Linspire and Xandros were two insignificant companies that are merely in their last throes, you have another thing coming. If you can not see the pattern right away, do not worry. I shall point it out in a future blog entry. In the meantime, to those who are ungrateful towards the KDE developers: GROW UP!
1 comments:
Actually, I felt that neither Allan nor Flar were particularly rude, but Flar especially got his ass handed to him and told to shove off.
Tempers were obviously flaring, but this time it was mostly defensive devs doing the flaming.
The devs need to discern between someone trying to give feedback which may be important ("This project is not meeting my needs and I'm changing software") and a flame.
I recently walked away from Ubuntu after almost four years, and I made sure that I let them know why when I did it. They failed to see the irony of their dismissal of my reasons as indicative of the problems I was on about.
The customer service industry wants to know these things, because otherwise they end up having an empty store and wondering WTF happened.
I hope the same doesn't happen to KDE.
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