Rant of the day.

[mixedgas]

Deleted for good reason.

Steve

[tribble]

I'm going to guess that for most people under a certain age today, calling the manufacturer either does not occur to them as an option, or if it does, it does not seem like a very viable or useful one. It may be that education on how things are done in "less consumer-oriented" echelons would be beneficial. But I think what we have here now is a tremendous increase in the number of hobbyists who started out by ingesting data from the internet, not any particular in-person mentor.

The Internet has made unbelievable quantities of data (viz. information) available at a moment's notice. If you have a question about anything in daily life, Google is a very reasonable first step these days. That utility has pushed other data source options to the fringes of consciousness. From one perspective, a specific forum may appear as the best collection of detailed knowledge about X, especially if there is fear (in today's super-litigious, regulated, terrorist-fearing times) that just asking questions is going to get you a visit from Men In Black Coats. 20 years ago, if you wanted information about a Spectra Physics head, there was NO option other than contacting them, and unless you lived down the street, NO option that was 'soon' other than phone. Those options are no longer first in peoples' minds, IMHO.

Couple that information source bias with the viability of contacting a manufacturer for detailed help or information about other technical things that surround us in daily life. Maybe you'll call Apple or Dell if you have a computer problem, or maybe you'll go to the phone carrier's store for a phone problem, but for your TV, phone, stereo, alarm clock, watch, coffeemaker, microwave, or anything else, just try to reach someone knowledgeable by phone. Can't be done. The futility of contacting the manufacturer, if you can even find a phone number, for such a wide swath of items in our daily lives makes it seem less useful even for those items where it may make the most sense. Couple that with the exponentially rarer human on the other end of the phone line, and the quasi-imaginary knowledgeable person at that... seems to make the 'net the go-to place for answers, however wrong that approach may be for some niche items.

So, in the end, I think it is an understandable byproduct of the times that, to counter, will take participation and energy from the support engineers to get themselves known in the channels of their users, however they may differ today than in the past. If Company X is tired of seeing reams of BS written about their product in forum Y, I really don't see any other answer than for Company X to spend some time participating in forum Y to say here are the facts, here is how you can reach us, we don't bite, and so forth. Of course, that has to be true... if Company X is tired of seeing BS about their products but doesn't really want their products used by certain people or in certain ways, then they have to decide what their goal is and how best to achieve it. But, waiting for phone calls in this day and age, sadly, is not going to get it done for them.

$0.02