The Creative Debacle: Why Pissing In Your Own Well is a Really Bad Idea
Sell Crippled Hardware and Shut Down Anyone Who Tries to Make It Work Right
?????
Profit!!!
Well, I’m sure it sounded like a good idea at the time…
Don’t know how many non-geeks are aware of the flaming ball of suck that has become hardware producer Creative’s response to a user-created hack, but it’s worth paying attention to.
To make a long story short, Creative produces the popular Sound Blaster soundcard. Which is great, except that there are some functionality issues in Vista and just in general that the users aren’t thrilled with. To be blunt, the sound cards are crippleware, meaning that their functionality is intentionally dehanced (lovely neologism, that) by the company in order to…well, I have no idea why, personally, since I’m not a hardware geek. But I’m guessing it’s either to sell more of a different hardware or upgrade, or as a butt-kiss to someone like Microsoft or the RIAA, as such companies have an unsettling tendency to get hardware makers to hobble their goods so as not to give the end user Too Much Freedom To Do With Their Purchased Goods As They Wish. (Can’t have the peasants getting it all their way, now can we?)
It’s like buying a car that won’t make left turns, because the car manufacturer has a deal with a soft drink company who’s slogan is “The ‘Right Way’ to Refresh,” or they have another line selling GPS units and want you to buy them in order to generate right-turn-only paths to your destinations. I.e. your car has the capacity to make left turns, but the company has interfered with the steering so that it won’t. But it’s your car…surely once you own it, you should be able to go in and remove that “fix” or have it removed for you. Right? Wrong…
Along comes Daniel_K, a modder (geek speak for someone who creates “mods,” or modifications). Daniel_K mods custom drivers for people who have bought the crippled hardware. These drivers give you the ability to actually use your Creative soundcard to do essential soundcardy things, functionality that the soundcard is already capable of but that has been hobbled in-store. In short, he makes downloadable “left-turn-enabling” patches.
Yay!!! The customers are thrilled. Now they can buy these really nice soundcards and still get the functionality they require for whatever applications they’re doing. So they buy more soundcards. The customers get functionality, the company gets sales, everybody’s happy, right? Wrong…
Here is Creative’s response to Daniel_K, basically a cease and desist letter whose content boils down to, “Quit making our stuff work, dammit. We farked it for a reason, and now you’re stealing from us by giving our customers the right to do what they want with the stuff they bought.”
This was posted in Creative’s own support/user forums. It was the equivalent of dumping flaming gasoline on a beehive. Welcome to the world of the Internet swarm. Enraged geeks from all over the place have been breaking their soundboards and posting pics, calling for boycotts, including setting up a site named BoycottCreative.com, spreading the word through top-listed sites like Digg and Reddit and just basically rampaging around loudly in forums and other outlets ‘net-wide. The Creative forum itself is full of thread titles like, “Recommend me a NON Creative sound card”, “Creative Boycott,” “FAIL” and just plain old “Bye.” (Or, at least, these posts are there right now, and haven’t been removed as of this writing.) There’s even a rather ominous thread titled “Class Action Filing.” That can’t be good.
To sum up, Creative got greedy and stupid. They decided it was better to sell crippled hardware to geeks whose sole purpose in life is to tweak their stuff for maximum power and functionality, and then attempt to tightly control what users could do with it (and thereby make more money through some corporate sleight of hand). And when someone came along and gave their customers what they actually wanted (i.e. the ability to use their soundcards to their fullest capacity), instead of saying, “Hey, great, thanks for fixing that - now our customers will be thrilled to buy even more of our stuff,” Creative shut them down, publicly and with clear statements to the effect that their priority was making money, not providing functional sound cards.
End result? It’s a reasonable possibility that Creative will suffer enough of a financial and PR setback to deal them a critical, or even possibly fatal, blow. The original cease-and-desist only went public two days ago, and already some retailers are suspending sales of Creative products due to the high rate of returns. Geeks around the world are boycotting, breaking and busting on Creative loudly and publicly.
In just a few days, Creative went from merely a clueless company producing good quality products that required some tweaking to really work well, to pure, unadulterated, kitten-punching evil bastards who have been caught publicly monologuing their evil plans at the battle-bloodied and bound-and-gagged hero (Daniel_K) who was trying to free the princess and save the day.
As they used to say back in the day, “Smooth move, Ex-lax.”
Moral of the story: DO NOT PISS IN YOUR OWN WELL.
Don’t try to sucker your core customers by selling them junk and pretending it’s a business model. Give them what they want, not what you want to give them. Don’t try to cripple what you sell in the hopes of selling more stuff to make up for what isn’t working (or by bowing to outside commercial influences) and then get mad when someone creates a work-around to your craptastic fail. You should be hiring those people, not trying to bury them.
And if you do fail to heed this warning, you’d better hope like hell you have a really good Plan B, such as a hefty retirement fund. Because you can’t unkill the Golden Goose, and your customers will be winging those golden eggs right back at your head with a vengeance when they find out what you’ve done.