My annual Toolbox license debacle...

Hello.

Once again, my Toolbox license renews, and I get billed. However, it seems too much to ask for Toolbox to actually recognize the renewal.

When is anyone there ever going to care enough about this to fix it? I once thought that paying for a commercial product would eliminate the search for tools that just work, but Parallels continues to show their willingness to charge an annual fee and deliver very little in exchange for that, other than a number of tools I can get for free elsewhere.

Parallels: whatever you think of yourself, you are *not* professionals, merely overpaid amateurs, with no pride in the product you sell.

P.S. Once again, an upgrade fails in the same way it has before. See the screenshots for the evidence.

 

For anyone wondering why there are multiple versions of these 2 screenshots, it's because the toy forum software reported that the initial image uploads failed due to being too large (5 GB and 3GB respectively). Clearly, they lied, and it appears I now cannot edit this post to remove them. (More overpaid amateurs at work.)

 

As a former commercial software developer, I can say that I have no respect for those whose default is that an issue must be reproduced before it can be diagnosed or corrected, as it means you *really* don't know your product. You will disagree, but you're wrong. Further, your product design reflects your lack of awareness as to what is possible, and this request itself reflects the laziness I find so prevalent today.

Before I give you the answers you lack, let's break this down, to see how much sense your request makes:

1. I reported this as an "annual" issue, so at best I would have to wait until next year for you to break it again before I can reproduce it.
2. The fact that you are requiring me to reproduce this also makes it clear that you are not using "Send Technical Data" as a means for sending you data Toolbox has already collected. (That you do not already have the data you need to identify and fix this issue is your *major* design failure.)
3. Since the setting change you request would require me to log in to Toolbox to make it, I would therefore need to *resolve* the issue I have, just so I could attempt to reproduce it.
4. At the moment in Toolbox v7.0.0-4147, the gear icon no longer has a "Preferences" selection. I know it once did, as I have used the "Detailed log" feature before (as well as "Send Technical Data") to report issues, but it does not now. Anyone looking at the screen images would immediately recognize this as a Windows installation, which I have found in many cases in the past to be a real problem with Parallels: you sell on the Windows platform, but you don't seem very conversant with it, compared to the Apple-related counterpart. (You should have known this already.)

Recognize that I am *not* here primarily to get this issue fixed, because any real software vendor would have already figured out what the issue was and corrected it. I am here to document my experience so that others will recognize the situations I am describing as your fault, not theirs. They can also laugh at the fact that anyone who thinks using social media as their only support path is a vendor worthy of respect.

To everyone: Ensure you keep a record of all your transactions with Parallels. By having a record of my license key, I got around this by simply selecting "Use Another License" from the Subscription Expired message, and pasting in my license key. This has happened before, and it will happen again, so be prepared.

To Parallels: hire product management and developers who understand the concept of first fault failure analysis, which is the ability to document, diagnose, and correct a problem the first time it occurs, with minimal additional action being required. In short: log files with relevant data, with verbosity adjusted on the fly as needed. You clearly have not done this, and you should simply be collecting the data the failure has already recorded, which would allow you to focus in on the solution without always needing to always reproduce it first. You will find this focus makes it much easier for your developers to reproduce the issue as well, since they will have *more insight* into which area of code is the likely cause.