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Au contraire--for example, one of Apple's top people has responded
publicly several times to some of the furor out of the iPhone App
Store and its rather bizarre application acceptance practices.
I have had several VP-level executives respond to queries of mine over
the years, from companies large and small. True, it is not common--but
it does indeed happen.
In this case, tech writers on this list are, from the perspective of a
documentation tools company, a rather influential bunch (believe it or
not!). It would not do for such a controversy to remain
unanswered--simply from a public relations standpoint. Letting this
kind of "buzz" circulate in the community, and potential sales can
suffer a highly adverse impact in short order.
Thus, it was the smart thing to do--and having a VP answer gave
sufficient authority to have the best chance of squelching the
controversy quickly.
As for "creating a .dll file"--in my view, that should be part of
Madcap's responsiblity, to provide it as part of the tool to their
customers to include if they wish, with a suitable statement of why
they might want to do so. After all, the same logic could be said to
apply for why choose their tool to begin with, when much simpler tools
can do much the same job after all. A specialized tool like their
software is supposed to make the job easier for their customer.
A part of the implementation, too, could well include suggested
informational verbiage for the end customers, such as specific
suggestions for firewall exceptions should the end customer choose to
enable the feedback.
Otherwise, I view their Feedback tool as incomplete.
David
> From: beelia <beelia -at- gmail -dot- com>
> To: sharon -at- anthrobytes -dot- com
> Date: Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:54:51 -0800
> Subject: Re: MacCap feedback - surreptitious reporting confirmed
> In my decades in high tech, I've never heard of a company's VP personally
> answering a single user's concern about one of their products in a public
> forum - much less in such excruciating technical detail.
>
> I've previously stated that Madcap's support is outstanding, and this is a
> very impressive case in point.
>
> Bee
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