Here's a post to Creative wishing you go out of business forever.

The corporate slime tricks are exposed and i will never buy another Creative product, ever. I used to recommend the Zen mp3 player over the ipod and rave about the X-fi. NO MORE.

Here's to wishing Asus (or some other company) luck on choking you out of business.

Thanks to digg.com for exposing this.

I've also been a Creative user for many years. My first CL card was a Soundblaster Pro, and I logged many a Wolfenstein3D and Doom hours on it. I went on to an AWE32 and then a Live. I stopped at the Audigy because I switched to a Mac, now that I'm gearing up to put together a gaming rig the last card I'm considering buying is a CreativeLabs card. Instead I'm considering Turtle Beach because of this very thread right here.

There's a lot more to CL than people know about too. I at one point was heavily involved in the graphics scene as well, and I got to personally know the custom engineering team from a few years back. I won't mention names, but I remember the days when CreativeLabs was a cool contemporary company. They even made a Glide wrapper officially for the graphics blaster card. Then they went on to make the stencil shadowing patch for Unreal.

They would make drivers at a person's whim, I even know when a journalist suggested maybe making some Mac drivers and Creative made it so. This was at a time, mind you, when the return on investment for making a Mac driver was zilch because Apple was in what seemed like death throes. Creative did it for good faith and good will. To see that Creative no longer sees value in good faith and goodwill is truly disappointing. No more of their revenues will come from the people that hoisted Creative onto the mainstream.

Creative has forgotten about all of us and is now run by bean counters and ad men. The nice thing about all this is that Creative will pay for this dire mistake. Every company that goes this route hemorrhages to death or to the brink of death. I just hate that it will take time for this to happen. What really stinks is that the technology by Aureal was never used, CreativeLabs just litigated their greatest competitor out of existence and then buried the technology even though consumers wanted it. I guess this is just poetic justice for it.

To the Creative Labs employees, ditch, leave this ship before it sinks and takes you with it. This tired dog is on its last leg and just biting at the hand that feeds it.

SPREAD SOME OF THE HEAT HERE GUYS!!!!

http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=116852

Writing this from Germany (*waves* to Creative Labs Europe).

Has anybody thought of mailing the high-level managers at Creative Labs Americas or even better Creative Technology Ltd., Singapore (you know, where the really important decisions) are made, about this? I doubt that Mr. Sim Wong Hoo (Chairman and CEO) gets his news from such credible sources as reddit or digg.

Otherwise the following scenario might ensue:

[Three Months from now - Conference Room - Day]

The quarterly meeting with CEO, Board of Directors and company officers is coming to an end...

International Sales Director:

... as you can see from this Mr. Hoo,

[points to his powerpoint presentation]

Creative Labs Americas' Second Quarter Sales have missed the projected target by 23.57%.

Mr. Hoo (stares blankly):

Why is that?

International Sales Director:

Our colleagues at CLA blame the weak Dollar.

Mr. Hoo:

Oh well, can't be helped. By the way, is the buffet open by now?

---

But serious, texts can be changed, blame can be shifted. In a lot of companies the higher ups are so far removed from the products and customers that they haven't the foggiest what is going on. Im sure Mr. Hoo would be delighted to let 100s of Daniel_Ks "work for free" (well, "open source" sounds kinda like "outsourced" so he wouldn't even notice the difference) as long as the bottomline is - at least - steady.

Oh, the irony - that this happened on a weekend and on Creative's own forums. Let's take a big dump in their whirlpool while their gone.

As a customer I'd like to add: You protect your IP, I protect my money.

I stopped buying Creative products after my bad experiences. Between their complete lack of support for their first MP3 Jukebox and failing to live up to their promises on the workings of the Audigy breakout box, I decided not to give any more money to a company that was just going to screw me. I'm glad to see my instincts were correct. Companies that routinely lie to their customers and try to shut down people offering up free help are on their way out.

Remember when Creative used to be the industry standard for sound cards? Now you're just as well off using what's integrated into the motherboard given the hassle Creative products now pose.

My condolances to those of you who have been suckered by these charlatans.

P.S. Came here via a front page post on Digg. 2000 Diggs and counting...

Getting into the way-back machine, I found this a tad interesting. In fact, this shred of greatness is one of the weighing factors that convinced me to buy a X-Fi.

Creative attempted to make their customers believe that changes in Vista were just announced. Look at the date here, it's important. These changes were so sudden and unexpected, that they would not be able to support their Audigy line of sound cards anymore. It was also said that many of the features that worked in XP would never work in Vista.

It appears Creative is doing well in ensuring that they still do not.

Sadly, there was far more warning then Creative was letting on. You can count much more warning then the date on this SDK artical and download from Microsoft's MSDN site. As many evil things as Microsoft does, you can bet that springing a change like this on hardware vendors is by far, not a last minute thing. If you can't believe that they only gave the vendors a year, let me ask you this. How did RC1 run on a general group of PCs for beta testers? A hardware vendor somewhere had to have some type of code to give to Microsoft, even if it was the 'generic' kind.

----------------

Q: How many Devs does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: None, working as intended!

Mr. O'Shaughnessy:

I have been a buyer of Creative SoundBlaster cards for nearly 15 years, including most recently an X-Fi XtremeGamer card. In the past, your products have delivered the best quality sound for entertainment, gaming, and general computer use, and I have been very happy with the products. That all changed with the release of Windows Vista. Since that time a year ago, Creative has done nothing but provide consistently buggy sound drivers, failed to provide features that exist for their cards on WindowsXP, failed to take advantage of the new sound models present in Windows Vista (such as WaveRT), and overall have failed to provide product support that meets the high standards set in the past. This latest release 2.15.006 has been especially poor.

It is extremely discouraging to see Creative stepping out to hinder the improvement of users’ SoundBlaster experience by harassing independent developers such as Daniel_K from your support forums. Where Creative has failed to provide, Daniel_K has stepped up to the plate, restore missing features, enabling hidden functionality, and improving stability on your products. He is increasing the value we, your paying customers, get out of the products you make. While you may have the right to insist that he stop, you do not have the best interests of your customers, your bottom line, or of your public image in mind. When your buggy, sub-par drivers are all that exist, SoundBlaster users cannot help but have a poor usage experience in Windows Vista, and you should not expect repeat business.

I know that after the events of recent months, I will be reconsidering my long-time “SoundBlaster” only shopping policy. Integrated Sound has come a long way since the 90’s in terms of support, stability, performance, and quality. I hope you all at Creative will reconsider your stance, and strive to improve your products, enhance and support your products accordingly, stop attacking the community that’s helping you hang on to what good reputation you still have.

Creative don't make particularly good products as it is, and when a user actually makes your products compatible with more systems allowing you to have more sales, you threaten them.

You are seriously messed up in the head. You will never recieve a penny from me. Ever.

goodbye and thankyou for destroying your business