|
The basic rule of customer service: set appropriate expectations, and then meet or exceed them.
iRex is pretty bad at setting appropriate customer expectations. Sure, the customers here and elsewhere had some very high expectations for iRex, but iRex encouraged those high expectations with promises they couldn't keep (for whatever reasons).
I bought my iLiad after FBReader had been ported, and virtually all of the time that I'm using it, I'm using community-developed software. I'm ok with that. By the time I bought mine, I knew about the power management problems, and that they would not be fixed. It took iRex a long time to admit that, and even after they admitted it, there were some pretty misleading statements on their marketing web pages about battery life. Talk about poor management of customer expectations!
And this trend continues. By continuously promising something like the multi-format viewer, iRex has in fact discouraged some community developers from working to solve the problems with the current set of viewers. That's what really annoys me. It's bad enough that iRex has failed to support the iLiad to the extent that they promised, but they've made it much harder than necessary for anyone else to pick up the slack.
If they're going to abandon any further development for the iLiad, as seems very likely, I hope they'll at least consider releasing source on the Content Lister so the community developers can fix it.
Meanwhile, the DS1000 is another "not there yet" product, in my opinion. Maybe iRex will deliver this time. Maybe they'll take the business world by storm and a couple of years from now they'll have almost completely replaced the use of desktop printers in businesses. But I, for one, am going to wait until they've got the product to a state where I think it would be usable as-is before buying, or recommending that anyone else buy.
|