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From: jsweet%uci-750a%rand-relay@sri-unix.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: How SPRs are handled
Message-ID: <15895@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 26-Jan-84 00:58:05 EST
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.15895
Posted: Thu Jan 26 00:58:05 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 27-Jan-84 09:07:19 EST
Lines: 45

From:  Jerry Sweet <jsweet%uci-750a@rand-relay>


I've often wondered what various companies do with Software Problem
Reports (SPR).  Once, when I sent in a report on Intel's Pascal-80,
I received a phone call from one of their support people, who went
over the report point-by-point with me.  Another time, I called
up Microsoft to report problems with their M80 assembler, got
connected with a guy who tried out each problem right then and there,
saying "yup, that's a problem, all right," but nothing else very
constructive.

Back in October, when I sent an SPR to Manx Software on their 6502 C
compiler, I expected some sort of reply, even if it was nothing more than an
acknowledgement of having received the SPR.  No such luck. I finally called
them up this afternoon and got a very candid response from one of their
technical people regarding what happens to their SPRs: they get thrown into
a slush pile and they rot, for the most part, which is apparently what
happened to mine.

To be fair to Manx however, this guy also said that they planned to
change the way that they handled SPRs real soon now.

Here's another horror story, this one about Anix 1.0 (essentially a shell
program for Apple DOS) from Lazer Microsystems (yeah, amusing product name,
ain't it?).  I sent in a long SPR (about six pages, as I recall), but never
received any sort of reply.  When I called them up several months later, I
found out that they had no plans to support Anix any further, in spite of
direct claims to the contrary in the documentation (what there was of it).
Made me feel warm all over.

Well, about the only thing I can say about software right now, based on
these experiences, is that it isn't a consumer's market.  A company that
takes any time at all answering its SPRs is something to be cherished.
Probably the only case in which you're guaranteed a response is where you
have some sort of printed media power, as (for one example) Jerry Pournelle
seems to have. It would be nice if info-micro, or access to the net in
general could provide this kind of potential power, but it would be wrong to
hold it over the head of a software supplier if he couldn't reply.  I
don't see it as wrong, however, to make an after-the-fact report such
as this one.

Comments?  Suggestions?

-jns