Dear Creative Labs,

I run a Computer Sales and Repair shop in St. Catharines, Ontario - Canada. I've spent years dealing with numerous support issues that are normally due to the shoddy quality of your drivers, most notably the Windows XP bluescreen days. I heard about this topic and it really concerns me. I don't want to do business with anyone who doesn't have my customers best interests in mind when selling me a product. Over the next 3 months I'm going to phase out Creative Labs products in our store entirely, I spoke with my suppliers and we've already found some alternatives to recommend to people.

I will actively steer people away from Creative products when they are brought up in conversation at my business or socially. You've had years to work on these issues and I've noticed your company hasn't suffered at all financially so it really boggles the mind how you not have corrected the situation.

Just off the top of my head:

- rebadging older products and charging higher prices

- Suing Aureal, buying the IP at bargain price and then ditching the superior technology to push your own inadequate solution

- Spending 5 years providing truly horrific drivers with stability problems from day 1 for Windows XP

- Given a 2 year head start to write drivers for Vista and failing, forcing Microsoft to remove the DirectSound abstraction layer so that they aren't blamed for your drivers crashing machines, harming customers and then having the nerve to charge money for ALchemy to rectify the problem.

- Attempting to pressure developers because you feel threatened by their software solutions, ie - patent wars with various companies

- Dishonest products with features such as the 24bit processor that wasn't.

- Not providing full driver downloads for 2 years, only "update" packages which forced customers to find their original CD.

- Bloated drivers with many features users didn't want in the first place, forced registration, etc.

That's it, it's over for me. I can't and won't do business with a company who is out to basically screw over my users and myself to make a buck. Everyone is out to make money but you can do it in a respectable manner while providing a solid product.

I highly recommend other people do the same as the rest of us if you're in a position to do so.

In the past I have looked upon Creative products with fond memories. Playing Thief 1 with EAX enabled was a thrilling experience. However, when a company takes a corporate stance against an individual that was assisting others have a better experience with their purchased products, it's a disappointing sight.

Regardless of IP issues, Creative should have looked at this as a great opportunity to turn a sad situation with Vista owners into something positive. They could have offered daniel_k a job or contract to continue developing his solution and have it distributed under a sanctioned Creative Labs offering. With signs pointing that the company is deliberately crippling their devices with their drivers and asking owners to pay additional money to enable them... this is disgusting.

I for one will not be purchasing a Creative product again unless there is a positive outcome to this issue. I'll be monitoring this by the news channels it's already spreading by: reddit.com, digg.com ... and growing.

Corporate Greed vs. Consumer Need.

Like so many others today, I've registered to say goodbye and hopefully warn potential customers about the numerous shortcomings and outright failures of this company. Creative's driver development team is hopelessly inept. Their drivers are consistently bloated, sloppy, slow, and bug-ridden. The bundled Creative-branded software is always terrible. Driver releases are incredibly infrequent. Bugs persist across several releases. Releases promising to correct a problem usually don't, and often cause new ones. Creative is unable and unwilling to even provide the features listed on their products' boxes, let alone improve on their offerings by adding features. Older products are deliberately crippled to encourage users to buy newer ones. Company representatives lie to customers about the reason features are disabled or not available. The company treats its customers with contempt.

I plan on chucking my x-fi into an industrial shredder and never purchasing a Creative product again. No Creative SB products, no webcams, no speakers, no audio players. I'm done with this lazy, incompetent, and disrespectful failure of a company.

I just registered today just to say that I will never support any Creative products again.

I'm just lucky I'm not using vista, still with the good old xp.

Bye Creative, you had your chance and you screw it up. Grats.

Dear Phil,

You make a variety of points so I'm going to address them one at a time:

"Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended."

So what you are saying here is that you never intended your sound cards to be fully utilized under Windows Vista? You might want to get that message out to whoever is doing your marketing materials because every time you mention that your product functions under Vista you are implying full functionality. It's that whole "Implied Warranty" thing... I'm sure you've heard about it.

"We took action to remove your thread because, like you, Creative and its technology partners think it is only fair to be compensated for goods and services."

The problem is that you aren't providing goods and services to your Windows Vista customers. You aren't entitled for monies for a good or service which you are NOT providing.

"The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing. By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods."

Uh, no, no he isn't. Unless you can prove he's using your code and didn't reverse engineer it on his own. If, as I suspect, he coded the drivers himself then you have a baseless claim.

"When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own. 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."

Again, see above. When you say that a card functions under Vista, with no disclaimer that some functions are enabled and some are not, you have lost this right under implied warranty. If someone, through the sweat of their brow, corrects your non-functioning product then they have the right to be paid for that service. Same as if I repaired a broken CD-ROM drive.

It's pretty clear that you don't know what you're talking about, I encourage you to take legal steps against your user base to fully cement the ridiculousness of this in court.

The sad thing is that the correct solution to this problem is quite simple... You pay the guy for the Vista driver he created and do what you want with it. But I guess paying someone for their hard work is beyond your corporate experience.

This is the sort of thing I have come to expect from Creative over the last few years. I used to love creative, I remember getting a soundblaster 512 pci and I used that for years, it worked amazingly well, even for an old card it still works to this day, as advertised. I recently got a 24 bit pci card and it works, but the sound quality is nowhere near what the old card had, the effects are all done through software (perhaps they could be done through hardware, but it is jsut turned off?) and the inputs don't work right. All of that was acceptable, to me, but this post made me remember the other shady and sad things creative has done over the years. Creative drivers with viruses in them. That 'patented' lighting technique that creative told John Carmack he couldn't use... well, you saw what happened there. Doom3 did sound processing with less than 5% of the cpu. EAX support in doom3? No, because Creative wanted to play games with laws, giving users and developers the stick to try to make some money. And now this. I knew that Vista had crative driver issues, but I did not know that there were working drivers for Vista. I feel compelled to donate to this guy now, whether I download his drivers or not. I'm definately going to be looking for another company the next time I need a sound card.

You see, Creative, computers are things that allow people to free themselves of the kind of real world shenanigans you are trying to pull. Video games (the real reason your cards were successful at all) are not about legalities, they are about having fun. Perhaps Creative should change their business model from something along the lines of:

produce cards that perform worse than their older counterparts, patent rendering techniques so that we can blackmail developers into paying for them or risk a law suit, cripple older cards so that people go buy the new ones with less features, less inputs, and less user control, and harass those who fix our drivers instead of hiring them onto the dev team full time to support our hardware.

to:

make money by making customers happy, give developers open access to techniques crative 'patented' (as this will help sell sound cards, and hey, you might even get some GOOD publicity out of it), and maybe... just maybe, donate some stuff to some needy people. And by needy, no I don't mean your developers, while I'm sure you pay them much less than they are worth and give them less benefits than their counterparts elsewhere, I mean people who don't even have computers, people without clean water, people who sleep in boxes behind goodwill.

Good luck Creative, can't wait to see your market ownership and stocks just SKYROCKET after the way you guys have been handling things lately. oh and Creative, fire Dale-CL.

You know I read this post when there was only 2 posts. Now look at it. Why on earth would a Creative VP post in a public forum???? Not one good thing can come from it. It should have been handled as a private matter between Daniel_K and Creative. BAD BAD PR move.

Now I understand it is within Creative's right to send Dainiel_K a C&D. No problem there. But it is a delicate situation as he is indeed helping people expand the life of their products that they purchased from you. However, extending the life of their product does not create new revenue streams for you...in a way, I understand that. You have to remember though, that people that have good working Audigy cards or whatever past models you have had, recommed to friends your brand and they in turn will most likely buy the newer models you have, and so on and so on.....that is how you keep your business going....keeping your customers happy both past, current and future customers. Businesses today seem to forget any customer who has not earned them recent revenue, but that can be a huge mistake for Brand Name recognition and future business.

I am sure there are many more companies out there who's business model is to get their customers to upgrade every so often to create new revenue streams, so condeming you for this is not right, it is bigger that that. We would like to believe that the company we have supported for many years is bigger than that...but I am sure that is too much. And like someone pointed out, Microsoft is partly to blame for this as well. Unfortunately, Creative is NOT Microsoft and the things Microsoft can get away with currently are things that I am afraid Creative can not.

With all this said, I have Vista Home Premium, a X-Fi XtremeMusic card, and between the lastest drivers and Alchemy, most things seem to be running as they did in XP. Now I mostly play games and listen to music, so this is where my Vista and X-FI experience is. You have to remember, that no matter what sound card you buy for Vista, unless there is a way to bring back some directsound functionality, they too will have problems under Vista. Lose some backwards capability or have flat audio responses. On board sound has gotten way better, but for those of us that play games or are high end audio users this still will not do. I want to continue to use Creative's products as currently and in the past they have done their job for me and my applications, but this whole thing is sure a black eye and needs Creative's fullest attention.

i registered so i could let you know i bookmarked this topic.

Whenever someone speaks of creative agian i will laugh and link them to this topic.

I used to like your hardware but all that is left now is a piece of **bleep** hanging on someones **bleep** hair