Who will convert to VMware Fusion when it is released?

Tom,

I don't know how you define your QoS level but support on this forum is pretty much nonexistent and now you are telling people to report problem here? I just did a quick scan of the last 52 messages, not counting today's posts, the Parallals team had replied to only 9, most of them were from Ynot and he was not even part of the support team. Many messages still have 0 reply and many more are still open, evidently no one can provide help. I can understand your hands off approach if this is an independent message board but it is not, it is the Parallels Support Forum operated by Parallels. The quality of this forum directly reflects the quality of Parallels support. I used to run part of the tech support of a major software development firm and we have a QoS policy that all email and web issues must be replied within 24 hour one way or the other. My team couldn't meet that. We only replied to 90% and was rated unsatisfactory by our customers. So don't give us the corporate spins about doing everything you can and QoS. Just fix the support process. Your paid customers deserve that.

 

No the paid customers DESERVE that (we desire it too).

If there was any way I could get a refund for the money I forked out for Parallels, I would go after it. I am terribly unhappy with the support. I think coherence mode is brilliant, but I honestly do not see Parallels lasting once VMWare is out unless VMWare is so over priced that Parallels can keep the home market.

 

Error corrected.

Thank you for catching that. English wasn't my first language. My first language was C.

 

Wasn't trying to correct any grammar. We really do desire it to.

 

For home use I'll keep Parallels. For work where I create, modify and trouble-shoot VMware Server VM's I'll use VMware Fusion.

 

What he said. That post from the "Support Manager" adds insult to injury. The fundamental problem is that Parallels does not have a shipping product in the normal sense of the term. It simply has too many bugs, many of them quite serious (like the Bootcamp bug) and too many instances of promised features that don't work (like cut and paste). That such problems persist in "release candidates" is unconscionable. That they persist in "gold" releases (isn't that what 3188 is supposed to be?) is absurd. And that Parallels refuses to provide support, not merely for paying customers, but even for those who pay for a support incident (as has been reported on this board many times) is preposterous.

Before it became known that Parallels has been owned for the past two years by a heavily funded holding company, one could excuse all this as the errors of a small, plucky group of programmers working on the cutting edge. But that just ain't so. Now they tell us that they have a support department deeply concerned with quality of service. But this only makes me wonder what they are smoking, or perhaps better, mainlining.

That Parallels persists in this false and misleading self-representation suggests that they are both arrogant and greedy, and also take their customers to be idiots and suckers.

To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, "You can't fool all of the people all of the time."

 

There's definitelly a process problem in the chain of customer support. The thing is, though, it's pretty much been like this for a whole year. Does Parallels HAVE any non-trivial number of support staff? It looks like to me that the company is just basically full of developers and like, two guys manning the support, and those two aren't exactly doing a good job either.

 

For the record....

....at least mine, anyway, on the several occasions that I've had to avail myself to phone support (one paid incident, several phone calls), I've been extremely impressed with the knowledge of their staff. But then, I had to scream and yell (or at least talk very loudly) to get help even after paying for that support.

All the clues point to an understaffed, overworked support staff. Pure and simple.

 

I also strongly believe the target user group for this product has little to no experience with virtual machines and the interesting (as in Chinese curse) interactions they have with the host and certain kinds of resources that don't share well concurrently with two operating systems. Add to that the glowing promises and bad USB support, a new language some are seeing for the first time: shared networking, NAT, memory allocations, DHCP management, bridged networking, and you have yourself a hopelessly helpless userbase.

Back that up with crappy documentation and worse telephone and email support, hide the self-help forums behind a veil of secrecy, and then start dropping beta and RC releases side by side with gold code and hell yes, you get chaos. I've been banging the process improvement drum for many months with little to show for it.

Despite all that I'm actually a satisfied customer but only because I've not had problems with the product but I'll quickly add that is because I know well what to expect and how to work around problems some find infinitely bewildering. This is intended to be a consumer level product but they've not done a good job to remove the education requirement hurdle from it. You need very much to know what you're doing with this stuff.

 

I am reasonably satisfied with the product, as like dkp I've not had any major problems (apart from unwittingly exposing my file system to Windows after installing an earlier beta in which this feature was irresponsibly enabled by default without any warning to the user). I have nowhere near his experience with virtualization, but having been working with both Macs and PC's going on two decades, and I generally puzzle my way through.

I do, however, have profound problems with Parallels as a company. Starting with their failure to indicate that early versions of the shipping prodcut didn't work with the Mac Pro, they have been evasive and obfuscatory. They promise features which don't work, offer features that weren't asked for, create security holes because they are too dumb to figure out how to avoid it and then claim user paranoia, claim that obviously buggy code is "gold," and otherwise treat their customers with disdain. They have, as dkp so aply pointed out, created chaos. I suspect this reflects the internal state of the company, and the absence of any mature and experienced leadership. But this is no excuse, only an explanation.

 

I can't wait...

my experience trying to get support at Parallels have been terrible to put it in simple words. On the other hand VMware gives me one day answers with high accuracy levels. I cannot even start thinking of suggesting Parallels in my deployments, until they put their act together and better their technical support.

 

Precisely. As I said in another forum, I've been treated more honorably and respectfully as a potential customer of VMWare than I have as a paying customer by Parallels. The VMWare team really seems to care what your experience is, offers substantive help, and responds quickly to even the most basic questions on their boards. No one tells you that you should have searched the forums before asking a question, no one tries to steer you into another topic, no one insults you or ridicules your question. It's a different world. Not all of this is attributable to the Parallels team, except insofar as their absence of support leaves a huge vacuum into which all manner of noise often enters.

One can only imagine that not only does the Parallels team care little about customer experience and satisfaction, but they are indifferent to their future as a company.

 

It is quite simply amazing that you make such leaps of logic. I have had no problem getting Tech Support from Paralllels and I've had no problems with the software. There are additional features that I'd love to see included but it does solve the problems that I needed to be solved in order to use it as my primary development platform.

Your local results may vary -- obviously -- and I can understand that you and others might be frustrate. But, you know, I'm really tired of hearing about how you or others are going to "jump ship" to VMWare or whatever.

If you're going to do that, please do so and ASAP. Otherwise, simply state your content in a simple way, without drama.

 

Val - it doesn't help to know you get support when others don't. Useful would be to know why. There are folks who have paid for telephone support and never got a return call. I think you would agree that's just not acceptable, with or without the drama.

 

I think it's helpful for people to know that most people have had a very pleasant experience with Parallels, since that is what has been happening from what I can tell.

I also know that I've asked for people who've said they've had support problems to send their emails to me and that I would then forward them to [email protected] to see what heppened. Now the interesting thing about that was that, despite my making that offer, and despite some people posting about their problems, I never actually received any such forwards. Of course there are a lot of reasons for that to happen and we're all left wondering about that and about the reasons for Parallels acting in some of the ways that it has.

 

Even casual perusal of this board reveals large numbers of very frustrated users, many of whom have reported the same bugs over and over again, yet others who have paid for but never received support, others of whom have had the OSX installation trashed, etc. etc. etc. Indeed, so large is the number of responses of this kind that one can only conclude that your experience is, logically speaking, the exception rather than the rule.

Failure to provide accessible support to paying customers is disrespectful to those customers. Failure to provide telephone support to those who specifically pay for it borders on the fraudulent. When combined with the confusing pattern of releases, including gold releases with serious bugs, this bespeaks disregard not only for the customer, but for the viability of the company, as many others have pointed out directly or indirectly. This isn't drama, it's common sense.

By constrast, drama is stating that if one observes and comments on Parallels' disrespectful and potentially self-destructive behavior, and recognizes that this inclines one (and any number of others) to consider a competing product, one should just say so and leave. But Val, Parallels isn't a religion, it isn't a form of patriotism. It isn't even a community. It's just a piece of software. And as far as I know, it isn't yours.

The relevent term of art is ego-syntonic. As a psychologist, Val surely knows what this means. He should remember Sulpicius' letter to Cicero: "...neque imitari malos medicos, qui in alienis morbis profitentur tenere se medicinae scientiam, ipsi se curare non possunt." (NB: Some scholars think this is a precursor to Luke 4:23).

 

I never read such offer myself - it probably got lost in the deluge of complaints. I'm not about to send anyone my personal e-mail, but if you do have rapport with the Parallels people, do ask them to reply on the following threads:

http://forum.parallels.com/thread9874.html
http://forum.parallels.com/thread10015.html
http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=9888&highlight=centos

Alternatively, they could reply to the following issues (reported by e-mail):

[Parallels #117545]
[Parallels #117881]
[Parallels #117896]


Best regards.

 

Maybe the Ted Bundy movie has put folks off people from the Pacific Northwest. Or maybe you've not offered a credible reason why you get good treatment when others are treated badly or ignored, leaving people wondering if mayhaps you're just lonely. Or perhaps everyone sees you as an apologist for Parallels on just about every controversial topic you've ever participated in here, and so are not a likely part of the solution. Possibly a little of each, in fact.

Seriously, if you cannot explain it then you can't depend on your good fortune to continue, and your offer as facilitator is illogical. It is of no value to herd people away from this product when what they really need is adequate vendor support.

 

And you know this how? Do you have hard data from the customer and user base the rest of us are not privy to? If these data are publicly available, please provide the source. If it is your opinion that most people are having a pleasant experience then don't be afraid to say so. If you're just making stuff up then your credibility has had another rung pulled from under it. The comments of this forum are not representitive one way or the other of customer satisfaction.

 

Do you really expect people to send their support problems to you? Your offer is so childish and insulting.