Creative driver debacle rumbles on
CREATIVE LABS JUST can't stay out of the news this week, unfortunately for the company it's all bad.
We've been following Creative's lacklustre support of Vista for some time now, including this piece from February 2007 which not only prompted a response from Creative but also prompted readers to mail us asking for further prodding of the sound-card producing behemoth. Earlier this week Creative released an involuntary adult movie cleanser, which didn't go down to well with some of our other readers.
Last month the company released X-Fi specs to open source coders, having promised Linux drivers for two years and only releasing a half-crippled beta driver - for the X86-64 architecture only, compiled with a 'back level' version of GCC. Basically this release enabled people with spare time to do the hard work for Creative, which the company couldn't be bothered with, to ensure their products worked on their choice of operating system.
You might not find it so surprising the company doesn't product much in the way of Linux driver support, not all companies do, but more surprising is the quality of support offered for the mass-market operating systems used on the majority of new consumer PCs -Windows Vista.
The driver packages on offer for various Creative products are so poor, that a lone hero by the name of 'Daniel_K' has produced a variety of altered drivers and packages that allow users to utilise their cards successfully on Vista, without a sub-standard feature set and continuous crashing.
Finally, after allowing Daniel_K to offer this service to Creative customers for a lenghty period - something Creative should have been doing from the start - a Creative spokes person demanded the user removed all links to his packages and stopped posting any more. You can read the forum announcement here.
As another poster points it - there's no doubt what Daniel_K has engineered violates the EULA that comes with Creative drivers and products, nor is it acceptable to accept money donations for other people's IP. However, if Creative won't offer customers the same feature set on Vista that appears on XP, and if Creative will not offer satisfactory driver support to a multi-million selling operating system, what does the company expect?
The furore on the forums saw a plethora of customers state they'd never touch a Creative product again:
"As for Creative, this is the worst attitude to the customers I've ever seen. I will certainly never buy any Creative product in my life and will advice against doing so any people I know. Bye Creative!" said alniks.
Toronto699 followed up with: "Bye Creative , your vista drivers are awefull , ill not buy or recommend any Creative product to anyone after reading your reaction to some very good drivers that creative is unwilling or unable to write...your support is terrible". Spelling mistakes left intact.
Phyltre's comments share similar sentiment with many other posts: "With this, you've lost another customer, Creative. I've been using this X-Fi in Vista for over a year now, and putting up with the glitches and the badly written software. Because your development team (although I can't imagine you're paying even a single person full-time for what we're seeing) would not work with us, the community was forced to work together to clean up your mess."
Creative has once again produced a master-stroke of bad publicity (at the time of writing the forum announcement appeared on Slashdot) and a potential massive backlash from its own user community. Who is to blame? Only Creative, whose ineptitude at producing and releasing drivers has caused the company only further misery in the long run.
One of Daniel_K's closing comments summarised the situation for us all:
"The funny thing is that you are faster 'protecting' your technologies and intellectual properties than providing improved drivers and software for your customers." µ
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/03/29/creative-driver-debacle
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