Practicalmadness

One thing I simply love about bloggers is their charming tendency to make a misstatement, get called on it and then call everyone who disagrees with them assholes not necessarily because they disagreed, but because on their personal weblogs they are entitled to be wrong. In other words, one’s blog does not exist in the reality-based community, where one should be troubled by anything like facts.

Take this recent piece of oversimplifying bitchery aimed at one of my favorite Mac application vendors, Ranchero Software (aka Brent Simmons) and their latest product, the desktop blog editor MarsEdit:

Can anyone tell me why a software company, no matter the size, would require users to join a mailing list (that generates a ton of unwanted email and spam) to receive basic customer service? Doesn’t that sound like a really, really bad idea? Remember when everyone was complaining about having to talk to someone in Asia to receive customer support? At this point I would love to talk to anyone, even in French if it meant I could get some assistance with MarsEdit.

(…Here our humble narrator describes his problem; deleted for irrelevance to the present discussion…)

Now I’m ok with software that doesn’t work with just a few clicks because not everything is that simple. And I can appreciate the labor it takes to make software — mostly because I get punch-drunk-stupid when I have to look at anything beyond HTML — but I don’t like the thought of having to join a mailing list to get support for software that I paid good money for.

That’s like Maytag telling me I have to join a twelve step program to find out why the washer doesn’t like colors mixed with whites.

I bring attention to this, which seems on the surface like a perfectly reasonable gripe about a for-profit company’s seemingly poor customer service, because it’s factually wrong and because it’s Brent. Ranchero doesn’t require you to join anything to get support; it just so happens that the MarsEdit mailing list (on which, by the by, I have never seen a single piece of spam) is the fastest, best way to get accurate, effective support. There’s a very passionate community of Mac users who are the sort of people who (virtually speaking) would, if you were pulled over with car trouble, stop and help you out.

But even if you don’t want to use the mailing list, there is an option: e-mail the company. If we were talking about a consumer product from a corporate vendor, this would be a ludicrous suggestion (although I’ve had some really awesome e-mail support experiences from companies much larger than Ranchero). Brent almost always responds to e-mail within 24 hours, and these kinds of interactions not only make him a good guy to do business with but help him get valuable feedback to make products better.

This isn’t PalmOne, a corporation with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, hiring some Indian teleservices firm to handle complex customer issues, or an ISP with millions of subscribers referring you to web-based support wizards. This is a tiny software company going above and beyond the call to support their customers through the most direct means available to them: your e-mail inbox.

Anyway, Brent responded in the comments to that post with his support e-mail address and a way to send him the exact XML-RPC error so he could troubleshoot the blogger’s MarsEdit error.

As far as the public record seems to show, while Brent has since added that e-mail address to the product pages for MarsEdit and NetNewsWire, the blogger in question has not recanted his statement that MarsEdit customers are required to join the mailing list to get support (which they are not), clarified that the mailing list is a discussion list rather than a one-way spam conduit or apologized to Brent.

The reason why such a correction is necessary is that small “artisanal” software vendors like Ranchero live or die by their reputations, and those reputations are formed by word of mouth, mostly on websites and (yes) weblogs. And in a world where people who use the word “asshat” on their website can be as credible as a New York Times technology columnist, these things matter.