People keep bringing up the subject of bugs in this thread. That should be a separate discussion. The customer support guys have nothing to do with fixing bugs. That would be the dev team.

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Kev999
People keep bringing up the subject of bugs in this thread. That should be a separate discussion. The customer support guys have nothing to do with fixing bugs. That would be the dev team.

True; but as customers we do not interact with "Dev Team." How many Dev Team members of a company do you interact with? The Support team are the first inline and so they will always get hammered...

 
It's doubtful whether the support team interact much with the dev team with regard to bug fixes. Bug reports get passed on, but info about progress on fixing them doesn't necessarily get passed back.
 
But, like I said, that should be a separate discussion.

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Kev999
People keep bringing up the subject of bugs in this thread. That should be a separate discussion. The customer support guys have nothing to do with fixing bugs. That would be the dev team.

True; but as customers we do not interact with "Dev Team." How many Dev Team members of a company do you interact with? The Support team are the first inline and so they will always get hammered. 

I too feel bad for these guys.

Regarding software bugs, it has traditionally been the responsibility of tech support to document the "recipe" for reproducing a problem, before forwarding it on to development for a fix. 
 
Development typically won't get involved until a valid bug report has been created.  If a bug cannot be reproduced by a tech in the lab, it is not very likely it will be fixed.  On a tangent, this may be the situation when corner cases occur, that seem to drag on for a long period, because "most" people don't have the issue.  Not saying they are not real, but maybe not affecting enough users to be viewed as a "major" problem, or just cannot be reproduced.
 
It seems that support is stuck in a tough place between customers and developers.  If you just contact them and claim you found a bug, they still have to verify it is actually a bug and make sure it is not user error, OS/system configuration issues, or 3rd party software conflicts.  Tough job for sure.  And each case could be very time consuming.

chuckebaby
I think we can all agree this thread is all over the road. I partially blame myself as well for adding my opinions.
I respect the OP for his concerns about support but Threads like this always end the same way.
arguments, negative debates and piling on.
 

Chuckebaby, as one of the most valued members of this forum I can see why you feel this way. For some odd reason differences of opinion sometimes make people feel uncomfortable. I don't personally feel the thread drifted away from the main ideas.
 
Here is a simple overview of how I see it- Agreement + Agreement = Agreement. Yay we all agree! yet there are always problems to be dealt with. How do we deal with problems if we always do everything the same way and everyone always agrees with it? In this respect it isn't negative. It's only negative if disrespect or name calling is involved. I'm sure the captain of the Titanic was in agreement with his crew right up until the ship went down.

Anderton
There have been mentions that Cakewalk should be more realistic in what they promise, and then people wouldn't be upset. So, they can simply take the Adobe text (referenced earlier) that basically says "Just because you paid for support, there's no guarantee we'll actually find or fix your issue" and change it to "Just because you got free support, there's no guarantee we'll actually find or fix your issue." Problem solved!

Exactly, as I have exhaustively stated, it's about perception. I also think that while Sonar has tremendously improved, the overall persona of Cakewalk has not. People still see this company as a tiny little entity design for the everyday musician. This can be very helpful but also create problems such as what this thread is pointing to.

Cakewalk needs to stop the business of appealing to the lowest bidder.


It's about impression and how you present yourself.

"Sonar is an Advanced Professional Music Production Software, if you are new to recording we recommend you start with one of our Home studio versions."

You may lose a few sales here and there but in the end, people will know what they are getting into.