It's time to stop being nice

[KeegdnaB42]

I am officially sick of the attitude companies have taken when we ask them to support WP. As any of you who've reached out to them know there is a 99.99% chance that you will get back some canned response about "evaluating options" or "there just aren't enough users" which we all know is bull because marketshare != install base.

It's all just PR spin and if they say "we'll pass your suggestions to our developers" it's just code for "we're just going to ignore this completely"
It's one thing for small companies with limited resources, but we're past the point where big names like Comcast and Starbucks who make billions of dollars have any excuse other than being cheap, lazy, or their developers are just fanboys, and it's time we started explicitly calling them out on it.

No more emailing or posting on their customer forums asking politely if they have plans. Demand it, especially for companies like Spotify who have apps already but refuse to support them properly. I'd go so far to say if it's a company you actually give regular business to, go a step beyond just threatening to leave. Tell them they are deliberately taking your money to subsidize the development for other platforms while denying you access to it. I'm planning on making that exact point to Comcast and I think I might even tell them I deserve a discount because of it because why should I pay for someone else to have a service I don't.

In any case, do not let them off if they try just giving a canned reply and consider the case closed. Word your demands for support so that they have no choice but to provide a valid excuse from whoever is actually working in development and remind them that they aren't allowed to only respect their customers when it's convenient for them.

 

[xandros9]

You raise some potentially valid points, but I don't think sheer rage will go very far.

At least there won't be truck bombs at least. (I hope)

 

[rluka]

No more emailing or posting on their customer forums asking politely if they have plans. Demand it, especially for companies like Spotify who have apps already but refuse to support them properly. I'd go so far to say if it's a company you actually give regular business to, go a step beyond just threatening to leave. Tell them they are deliberately taking your money to subsidize the development for other platforms while denying you access to it. I'm planning on making that exact point to Comcast and I think I might even tell them I deserve a discount because of it because why should I pay for someone else to have a service I don't.

In most case, customer support in big companies works like reactive armour. They're supposed to take away the impact so the body behind it doesn't have to.

Executive Bomb

 

[Keith Brooks]

It's probably more like Apple and Google are paying them to not offer anything from Microsoft. It's actually funny if you think about it. Last time I checked Nokia always had the better camera's with Carl Zeiss lenses and terrific photo app's. Not Samsung, HTC, etc.

 

[Ali El]

I once suggested that companies open up some kind of closed API to select third party devs to do the heavy lifting (YES, this is not our jobs, but after coming to the realization that no one cares about us, I've settled for this) so that we can make our own beautiful experience, but man was I shot down, and HARD! haha. Want to know the funny part? I was shot down by other third party devs for even suggesting such a crude idea. You do raise a very valid point about Spotify though. I used it once on my brothers Android, and GOODNESS was it a HUGE difference. This is favoritism at it's best. What can we do? I bet most of the large companies don't even have real people replying and Smart Auto replies.