lol @ Creative. Way to go champs. Creative obviously doesn't have a PR person. You send a C&D on a message board. Try a formal letter next time, you just MIGHT come off as a professional company.

lol @ message board threats. Holy crap. A million dollar company is e-threating people. LOL

Soliciting donations? Okay, I'll give you that. A bit of an underhanded thing to do.

Yet how many underhanded things has Creative done? Gee, there's the purposeful crippling of Audigy and Live cards for one. Then there's the purposefully rebranded Sound Blaster cards with the X-Fi name (which still has the problem of completely stopping during intense processing, and never restarting until I restart my computer) then there was Aureal, which is too bad, since it pretty much epitomizes your hatred for competition and inability to admit defeat in the face of better technology.

The list seems to go on, and now here we are. Complete lack of effort in supporting YOUR products on a newer operating system (albeit it has its own downfalls) total apathy towards those customers that are upset about this whole fiasco, and an unwillingness to even allow them to get the products working that they purchased from YOU on their own time, which they should not have to deal with in the first place. Fact is, all you do is absorb other technology, rub out the companies that you bought, and ignore those that purchased products from the companies that you purchased, and THEN you cry foul when somebody tries to help those with what would otherwise be elaborate paperweights.

I was very iffy when I purchased my current X-Fi card, and the issues I've had with it reminded me why I've never wanted to deal with Creative. I only hope that I get my mail-in rebate back from you guys, though I'm certain you'll try slither your way out of that one too. Thanks.

@Daniel_K you have make a great job.

@Crative: you sucks.

From a previous post here:

Creative stated those features wont work under Vista and Daniel_K comes along and proves otherwise and releases a superior driver. Makes the product work as "Marketted" and appeases many disgruntled users.

From Creative:

We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards.

and

If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.

It could be that we have 2 issues.

1: The cards are somewhat crippled on purpose moving to Vista to prompt an upgrade. Not in such a manner that makes them unusable, but that turns off some features.

2: The cards, in addition to the deliberately broken parts, are futher broken beyond the point they should b, to where claims of "working" constitute false advertising.

They may be happy with Daniel_K fixing 2, but not 1. (Although, in the interest of promoting upgrades, they'ed probably rather he not fix either)

What Creative doesn't realize is that if you have to replace a card because it's not working, you're not likely to replace it with another card by the same company, you'll look around, see who has the best support and choose THAT company. End result: consumer bad-will, and none of the extra sales of higher end products you were trying to force people into. Worse yet, with news of this around, those who research before buying won't but the upper cards because of the company's behavior, so even without the huge spectacle this has become the BASE idea of what they were trying to do was a losing proposition because of one little detail. News spreads. Once one person finds out about deliberate crippling, which is in effect admitted with the line:

If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.

and the knowledge that the feature can be turned on and off with a driver patch, ie the feature is always (h/w-wise) there, but deliberately turned off.

A word to Creative, and to any other company reading this thread to learn from their PR mistakes. Impress on those above you the extreme not-just-potential-but-inevitablility of a bad pr explosion from trying to be "sneaky" with your customers. With so much of the market on the net, and so many of the sorts of experimenters who would do what it took to hack the iPhone, the Furby etc, expect that whatever you're trying to hide will be discovered as a matter of course within a month, from sheer #s of curious people.

Another recent important note, wikileaks collapsed from inability to handle traffic.

Even outside the hacking type community, the general public is so on the lookout these days for scams and conspiracies that society in general is looking to catch you in the act. This sort of thing is the "in gossip" at the moment. Further consider that if you can AT ALL be considered an after-market product, you absolutely REQUIRE good-will, and that's easy to lose accidently.

Creative may be a write off (they wouldn't have reacted like this if they'ed sat down and thought things out logically, if whoever made the decision to behave in this way had done their research, they would NOT have behaved like this, perhaps an NDA with a small (to Creative but big to the developer) payoff to cease and desist quietly), but hopefully another company reading this will learn from their mistakes.

We're an odd species, that loves to be angry, and loves to believe in things. We're looking for things to be angry about and to believe in. Do you want to be one of the companies we believe we can have good faith in, or one we believe we're rightly justified in being very angry about.

I have registered just to say this to Creative.

I have been purchasing your products since the early 90's somewhere around 1993 I got my first sound card from you. Over the years I have kept nearly all the products. Watching this sickening display by your company I have decided NEVER again to purchase another Creative product so long as I live. At this time ALL my Creative products including my latest XFI will be placed in a pile on my B-B-Q grill and burned to a crisp.

Youve lost me as a customer FOREVER and nothing short of a miracle on your part will fix your image in my eyes! You will never see another penny from me... Good bye and good riddens.

Sincerely,

Former Creative Product User

P.S. Can I get a refund on 15 years worth of creative products please?

Dear Creative,

Power users, geeks, and nerds who read Slashdot and Digg are pretty much the only people who think they might need a sound card to replace what's built into every motherboard sold across the planet today. And you've just managed to piss them all off. Way to alienate pretty much your entire consumer base for sound cards.

You might have been able to get away with such nonsense when the geeks of the world couldn't get coordinated, such as when I purchased my first Creative Lab's product in the early 90's. Welcome to 2008, when consumers can easily research product choices, Google can permanently archive your stupidity, and sites like Slashdot and Digg can let your current and potential future customers communicate with each other.

Windows Seven is only two or three years away. Judging from past performance, I suggest you get started with drivers now, so you'll only be a year or two late with driver support.

Sincerely,

A Former Customer, who's also annoyed you dropped gameport support from Vista, yet is now using it due to hacked drivers.

Creative failed at grasping the MOST IMPORTANT rule in a business/sales.

NEVER over promise and under deliver. This is a sales death sentence which you are executing perfectly

> without actually doing any R&D to make a better product assuming
that the clueless middle-America consumer would fail to notice and
gobble up the latest gadget and do-dad.

Creative used to have good reason to expect this. They were the best known name and computers didn't ship with "good enough" sound. The PC Speaker wasn't "good enough".

For Joe Sixpack, modern onboard audio is.

Soundcard makers have 3 choices now, impress, become the on-board supplier or go under.

Heh - just stumbled this, and glad i did.

Couple comments from one PR guy to another. Announcing stuff like this in a forum like this is pretty silly. Now you risk a copy of this thread cached in Google's search engine, as well as several customer made backups. A lot of people have apparently seen this. This should have been handled via email or something. To be honest, I'm suprised you haven't deleted this thread, and a formal apology made or something. (Or even further explaination on your position.)

When somebody goes through a lot of work for free to make your product work on something that expands your customer base, I would call that a good thing. I would encourage it, as it means your developers are free to work on more important things. If there are IP issues with Dolby or somebody, wouldn't it be better to at least talk about the issue rather than shoot it down, as this guy (from what I can tell) has done you a favor in good faith. It was apparently worth the effort, and a lot of people agree.

The things people are saying here is valuable information, as they are/were your current customers, who have already invested money in your products, telling you what they want to spend money on. Usually, this type of information is a little trickier to get.

Now from one consumer to a company VP.

I personally run Linux, and have been waiting a little over a year for X-Fi drivers to come out in Linux so I could buy one of your cards. My Bose headphones cry every time I plug them into my SB Live! card every day. They cry for an X-Fi card.

I've been happy with the linux support you've provided in the past and I was interested in purchasing an upgrade. Unfortunatly, because I've heard of this issue, it makes me wonder if you guys are actually trying, or just leading people along - hoping they'll get impatient and buy your product anyway. Maybe you're counting on that. This thread certainly doesn't help your case.

Unfortunately, there really aren't any other cards out there that do what yours do. If there were, and it worked in Linux, I'd already own one.

I'm sorry to say it, but it looks like you guys are going to have to work something out quick, or else you're going to continue to hemorage customers.

Good Luck. Pray that none of your competitors notice this thread, as it would be an excellent opportunity to pick up more valuable marketshare.

Another new registration to vent about products be time table obsolesced by Creative for sheer profit before they even can make them work properly. As a long time customer who has bought 3 or 4 Creative soundcards and probably influenced another 3 or 4 friends and family to purchase, I have to say I never will again be a customer and will advise others to steer clear of crappy corporations that schill out shoddy products.

Perhaps Daniel_K did goa bit far in his request for donations, but his work further proves the point that Creative actively cripples hardware features that are indeed available on audio hardware they release. Sad sad sad!

via a link from reddit.com,

Mike