The Yamaha AN1x Synthesizer mailing list

All,

Too add a little to what Jon said -- OK, maybe to flog a dead horse, but 
I've been known to do that on occasion:

>I'd like to take one last opportunity to comment on the AN200
>situation. Since I've owned my An1x I've had contact with YCA on three
>seperate occasions and they've come through for me each time.
>Consequently I've spent more money on Yamaha peripherals for my set-up.
>
>{snip}
>
>Don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to paint a perfect picture here but
>I *do sincerely believe* these large companies need every possible
>opportunity to improve. I hnoestly don't think anybody at Yamaha WANTS
>to provides poor service but sometimes it takes a few tries to get
>things right. Sometimes many, many tries, right? Riiiight ;-) haha ha
>
>Many of us can relate to the scenario's as described by Bastiaan -
>they're all too frequent and all too common. That's why we have to try
>and 'help' the Yamaha's improve. Too not do so is akin to shooting
>ourselves in the foot (and Tom will then make more "JR" for Dallas
>jokes ;-)

Big companies, music or otherwise, play the percentages on support 
issues.  I've worked for four different PC companies in my career, and 
here's what I saw:

A firmware update can easily cost $20-50K (USD) in engineering time, test 
group time, and distribution.   It also increases the need for support 
teams to handle user questions before, during, and after the update.  It 
opens the product to the risk that fixing your problem might make a new 
problem for someone else.  And finally, finding a fix takes the development 
and test teams away from other tasks, like making new products so the 
company can stay in business another year!  All this potential expense (and 
risk) is for a product that has already been sold, so while companies 
recognize that fixing the bug affects customer satisfaction, it's often 
difficult to turn that statement into a hard number.  The question always 
comes down to a) how severe is the problem?  b) how many did we sell ?  c) 
how likely is a user to see the problem?  The perceived need for a fix is 
found by "multiplying" a) x b) x c).

Item b) is completely objective, but items a) and c) are often difficult to 
quantize.  Since no one likes to spend money needlessly, there is a 
tendency to downplay these two subjective factors when making a decision.

What you can do as a customer is make Yamaha aware that c) you DO see the 
problem, on a regular basis; and a) the problem affects the use of your 
product.  (The headers are deliberately out of order, in order to map to 
the questions asked in the first paragraph.)  The more people who respond, 
the   larger the a) and c) factors become.

And, as Jon said, do it rationally and calmly -- no flames.  Just as in any 
other person-to-person interaction, you'll get more results by stating your 
case in a positive manner.

Regards,

-BW

--
Bruce Wahler
Design Consultant
Ashby Solutions™
www.ashbysolutions.com
CloneWheel Support Group moderator
978.386.7389  voice
978.964.0547 fax
bruce@...