Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!pasteur!hamilton.Berkeley.EDU!nlouie
From: nlouie@hamilton.Berkeley.EDU (Nancy Louie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: HP Customer Support...
Message-ID: <20394@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 7 Dec 89 01:14:34 GMT
References: <203@limbo.Intuitive.Com> <1320019@hp-ptp.HP.COM>
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU
Reply-To: nlouie@hamilton.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Nancy Louie)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 67


In article <1320019@hp-ptp.HP.COM> mck@hp-ptp.HP.COM (Doug_McKenzie) writes:
>Dave, what are you saying?  It seems what you're suggesting is that HP
>Support is terrible, the best in the business.  It's like after insulting
>and accusing HP of almost malicious negligence, you feel apologetic?!? 
>

	Come on, Doug.  That's not what he's saying at all.  If you think
	about *what* he's saying, rather than how he's saying it, you'll
	see that he is making general statements about support organizations
	as a whole, and, since this is an HP related newsgroup, he's citing
	examples from his experiences with HP.

>You found "hundreds of bugs", "NONE of them were ever resolved"?  Are you
>serious?  With this 0% fix rate, I suppose your inescapable conclusion is
>that no bugs ever found in HP-UX by anyone, are ever fixed.

	One person's submissions do not the whole encompass.  I myself
	submitted a good number of bugs while at HP.  Some of which were
	fixed fairly soon, and some which took over a year to get a first
	response.  One in particular came back with a "cannot reproduce"
	type of message, and I went over to the machine and the problem
	was still there.  
>
>I don't deny that bugs have been reported, and not fixed.  Most of these
>have to do with being found too late to make it into the "frozen" release.
.
.
>                                   It's a matter of balancing timing with
>the criticalness of the bug.
>

	Do you really think this is true?  From my experience, it's not
	really the case.  There were times when we would find bugs during
	field review that would not get fixed, and there were definitely
	bugs which I had submitted as serious, that I never even heard back
	from by the time I left the company.  It's true that low priority
	bugs which are submitted just before a code freeze will most likely
	*not* make it into the release, but at the same time, the amount
	of time needed to fix the bug should also be taken into consideration.
	If a bug fix consists of changing one line of code, and the engineer
	is reasonably sure that it wouldn't affect the release and make the
	test suites fail, don't you think that it would be reasonable to
	try to get that fix into the release?

>I wouldn't even deny that some bug fixes fail to make it into subsequent
>releases.  Nobody's perfect, some bugs fall through holes.  I do deny that
>it's common, much less "almost traditional ... [that] it would just vanish".

	If these are, indeed, the reasons, then don't you think it
	reasonable that the submitter get a message stating this?  In
	these cases, they don't get anything back.  I was one of those
	people whose bug reports sometimes fell into the black hole ...

>Maybe so.  Care to name a few (bugs, not friends :-)?

	fingerd -- fingering a user on the system would return a message
		   stating that the user was not logged in.
        talkd  -- inappropriate messages trying to establish connection,
		  failure to establish connection to user.

>Well, once again I can't deny that this ever happens, but I don't know of
>any times that it has.  

	I do.  I supported one of those customers.  The lab took a while to 
	finally respond and when I left, it still wasn't resolved -- after 
	3 months.