Does Sony listen?

[weirichk]

Good morning,

Does anyone on the forum know if Sony accepts and listens to input from ebook users regarding recommendations for improvements on its ebook software? I really like my PRS-300 but find the PC software lacks refinement - it is hard for me to believe that this is revision 3! I would like to offer constructive recommendations to Sony but can't find any way other than their customer service input. I concerned that info there would not make it to the development team.

Any thoughts?
-Kurt

[tovare]

I've read elsewhere in this forum that people at Sony reads it occationally. I've worked with outsourced customer care and we routinely forwarded customer feedback to product or market management. A solid inquiry with well founded concrete sugestions to Sony in writing might end up in the right hands.

Considering the track-record of most equipment-manufacturers, I think the Sony software is actually quite awesome (Thinking in this instance about the woes, syncing my Casio graphic calulator with the PC).

[kennyc]

I only use the Sony Library software to access the Sony Ebook store. I use Calibre to manage my library.

[FragFrog]

Originally Posted by weirichk

Any thoughts?

Providing my experience with professional software developement is anything to go by: you don't want to get to the development department. Developers don't make decisions about features or useability, at least, you will generally be lucky if they don't. The only reason to bring developers in contact with users is when they are troubleshooting specific, hard to reproduce bugs (and bugs are not the same as things that don't work how you want them to - since 99% of all users does not know this there is generally one or two levels of support personel between developers and consumers to prevent them wasting their time).

Instead, you will want to reach the management level and, judging by the size of the company, useability research labs (although this implies they do some sort of useability research for their library software, something I find hard to believe). Is this feasable? Sometimes - but in my experience, the bigger the company, the less they listen to (individual) customers. Still, it goes to show that a lot of people here seem to find a free 3rd party program far superior to what they gobbled together (although it might be a good idea to create a poll on this issue since this is merely my own objective observation at this point).

If you can come up with some solid recommendations and attainable features, compile them in a good list, preferably with a clear explanation, useage scenarios and argumentation, it might come through. As an (ex-) software developer myself I have some experience with user suggestions, and requests along the lines of "do something with news feeds!" are about as usefull as a chocolate kettle, yet sadly by far the most abundant.

[weirichk]

I am not satisfied with the stability of calibre (at least as it is installed on my laptop) so I don't use it for anything other than converting my existing ebook library to epubs. I am planning on moving the software applications to a faster PC and may give calibre another try at that time.

I used to work as a software development project manager, FragFrog, so I know what you mean about user suggestions! I want to take the route that would most likely result in suggestions getting to the right people.

Thanks everyone for their thoughts.
-Kurt

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by weirichk

I am not satisfied with the stability of calibre (at least as it is installed on my laptop) so I don't use it for anything other than converting my existing ebook library to epubs. I am planning on moving the software applications to a faster PC and may give calibre another try at that time.

I used to work as a software development project manager, FragFrog, so I know what you mean about user suggestions! I want to take the route that would most likely result in suggestions getting to the right people.

Thanks everyone for their thoughts.
-Kurt

Huh? What are you seeing that is unstable? It's been rock solid stead for me since I've been using it (barring that one import bug a couple of revisions back, but that was not instability but a flat out bug). What OS are you running on the laptop?

[FragFrog]

Originally Posted by weirichk

I used to work as a software development project manager, FragFrog, so I know what you mean about user suggestions! I want to take the route that would most likely result in suggestions getting to the right people.

In that case my apologies for stating the blindingly obvious - I fear too much user interaction has made me cynical about the insight in software development of the average internet user

Stability problems with Calibre are new to me too though; in fact, EBL has crashed a dozen times already here but I have yet to see a single crash from Calibre (using windows Vista and 7). At the risk of again stating the obvious, have you tried the latest release already?

[jaxx6166]

Sony supposedly has a spider that mines the interwebs for any mention of their products

[tovare]

Originally Posted by jaxx6166

Sony supposedly has a spider that mines the interwebs for any mention of their products

They probably do. There is a whole industry catering for the reputation management of large firms.

Companies like Asomo, Attentio, Brandwatch, CyberAlert, Cymfony, FindAgent, iCrossing, Market Sentinel, Nielsen Online, Onalytica, Radian6, RepuMetrix, Reputica, StrategyEye, Techrigy, Trackur etc.

In fact an old manager of mine founded one of them and might read this message in a few minutes because their brand is mentioned. Hei Per, håper det går bra med dere :-)