Is Parallels taking its' users for granted?

John,

How can I stay updated about the status of my support ticket? How can I know where it is in the system and if it has been transferred to the sales team?

 

You will receive replies, and as I mentioned let me know id , and I forward ticket

 

I will ask Team Lead of support to answer you, and she will forward ticket further if necessary, while contacting necessary persons, related to upgrade policy

 

I would like to point out for the record that you instructed us to contact sales, not technical support for our issue. Then instead of providing us with a means to contact sales, you referred to tech support (which you specifically ruled out previously). With that said, I have sent in ticket 611506 and I am waiting for you to resolve this. I already don't trust you, but if you break your word again, there will be consequences. This is not how you do business.

 

for those of you looking for a way to contact sales, try following this link:

http://www.parallels.com/contact/

 

Why you do not trust me, as far as I remember I didn't break any promise on this forum?

 

I don't trust you for 2 reasons.

1. You backpedaled on us contacting sales.

2. You've been talking about these new builds and updates for over a year in some cases, but haven't delivered.

That latter may be "killing the messenger" but I don't care anymore. Your loyalty lies with your company, and that's fine. As your customer, I reserve the right to revoke my trust in you and your company, when it does things to break that trust. i.e. Failure to resolve these issues, especially in a timely fashion, overcharging for products that don't deliver as advertised, etc.

 

1. I selected correct procedure, not the one you prefer , it is our company policy
2. I am not talking I am bringing'em up here all builds since 5608

 

Those numbers would be long distance for most people.

 

That is only partially correct. PD3 builds since 5608 may be offered here, but they are not living up to the advertisements and promises the company made concerning them. Look at Parallels Workstation for Windows and Linux. Are you ignoring the fact that the thread was started last July, 15 months ago? You mentioned in that thread that you were running PW3. Where is that build now? Instead of releasing that to us paying customers who can't even depend on 2.2's functionality, you start talking about a PW4. You have totally missed the boat on giving us updates and upgrades in a timely fashion. I would not be surprised if a year from now we haven't seen PW4 and you start mentioning a PW5 in internal testing. Back to PD4, why should we pay for an upgrade that fixes the problems PD3 has, and includes the updates PD3 was supposed to get (SMP, DX9, etc.)? That is the heart of the issue here. I have given your company money on 3 occasions, and all I have to show for it is beta software that works pretty good (PD4), and production software that doesn't (PW2 and PD3). Sure I own the licenses of the live copies of PW2 and PD3, but they're not functional to the level of use for which they were purchased.

 

Wait. I am here from May of 2008
When you say you do not trust me, I am taking it personal, I specially asked you, "why you do not trust me"
And now you are talking about 15 month old thread?
About Parallels Workstation 3, we omit it, because most of implemented features were not stable

 

You posted on 6-24-2008 in a thread, http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=14196&page=2, which is 15 months old. You may not have started the thread, but you posted in it when you came on board and have been posting ever since. As to your other comments about PD3, all the more reason to give us a free update to PD4.

 

I do not agree with such interpretation, and also I am not the one to decide who is eligible for free upgrade, and neither my post can be basis for such statement.
It is the same if I come to Apple and say,
hey I am your customer since System 7, and I am missed many features you promised, so I am eligible for free Leopard

Anyway, I suppose this discussion should be passed to management which I already did, and let'em decide, which , how, and why

 

I can't say John that I'm altogether suprised at this response. Neither should you be. I warned you several weeks ago about how users (including myself) would not stand for paying for an upgrade to software which lacked advertised features, and were extremely buggy and broken. I realize that Parallels is a business, and they have to make money, but not at the cost of alienation of their userbase.

By the way, and this is not intended as an insult to you, but is English your second language? If it is, then it explains some of the posts I've seen.

Several of the posts you have up here are very fragmented, and hard to understand grammatically. I think if you're wanting to get your point across, you may want to reply to posters with a bit more clarity.

From what I've gathered, you've turned this thread over to management; so let's not torture John anymore and say directly to Parallels managment the following:

You promised features and functions in version 3 that did not materialize. You also released software that is known by the community at large and by Mac users in general (such as ArsTechnica for example) as being broken, unusuable by some and buggy to say the least. The predominant opinion on sites like ArsTechnica is that Fusion is a more solid and better product than Parallels. This is because of the problems with version 3.

Now you've released version 4, and expect people to pay for an upgrade from a piece of software that was broken to begin with. That's not good business. I've tested version 4, and so far, it's much better than it's predecessor. You've really put a lot of work into it. These are not people who are looking to get something for nothing; they're looking to get what they initially paid for. Version 4 needs to be free for all version 3 users. Provided version 4 stays as stable as I've seen it, then most users would be willing to pay for version 5 when you come up with it.

Do the right thing here.

 

Is that REALLY the same? I mean what features of Leopard were promised in version 7? Wouldn't it be more like you got a version of OSX Tiger and were promised some features of Leopard and they did not deliver...?

But you mentioned the features were not stable hence you did not implement 'em in version 3. Now that you have figured out how to implement those features, why don't you make a version 3.5 and implement the missing features that were promised. Version 4 could then be the version with the extra software and the extra functions that were not promised...

But I reckon that is all just dreaming. Parallels have been highly aggressive with Parallels 3 trying to get a massive amount of new users via 3 or 4 bundles. Money lost on those bundles can only be seen as a nice way to get a huge amount of money later on with the upgrade to version 4. I have not looked into it, but if I guess right all bundles with Parallels 3 included do not cut the "free upgrade date" required.. or?

From a legal pov I am not sure if it's legal to promisse some features in version 3 and then not include those before version 4 - anyone know someone who can comment on this. It seems like false marketing or whatever it is called...

 

Nothing illegal about getting features in a new version and not seeing them in the current/old version, even if "marketing" has in the past said or implied "the" features would be in the current/old version. There is no binding contract that states what you paid for also will include in a future date the promised feature, unless you have have some alternate contract the rest of us do not have.

 

Just recall on Location feature, and its multiple reincarnation up to Tiger

 

Parallel user since 1.0

John,
This is not a personal attack, but your management needs to know that your customers are not happy. While it appears that you are truly trying to help, the simple fact is that Parallel staff has been promising features for over a year, that management now want us to pay for.

Example Sandro on 9/7/2007 http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=15859
Example STim on 6/10/2007 http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=12802
Example STim on 6/7/2007 (And he states that SMP will be a free upgrade) http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=12458
Example tactit_one 4/6/2006 http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=72

I remember some other Parallel staff making these promises that I can not find right now. Maybe they were shooting their mouths off, and should not have been, but they did make these promises in the name of Parallels. Quite honestly these promises are why I decided to stay with Parallels instead of switching to VMWare.

I like the other poster's suggestion to put the promised features like SMP and vista drivers in a 3.5 (Or even a later 3.0 build) and leave the truly new features in 4.0 (like iPhone support).

To put it bluntly, if I am going to pay to get SMP support, my money is going to a company that has been over-delivering and under-promising (ie VMWare).

 

Looks like I'm not the only one with these problems.. Yes, now that the Vista Aero features were mentioned, I remembered wanting to buy PD3 back then because of alleged Vista support. Which was later proven to be bullcrap and therefore clearly proof of false advertising.

Your company is out to make money - which company isn't? But citing improper analogies like "System 7 to Leopard" is ridiculous and absolutely out of point, as are many of your replies here - I guess English really isn't your first language, or you would not have misunderstood/mis-replied to some of the questions.

Now, the question remains. Why should you force your customers to request "support tickets" on something that is clear for the world to see? To force them to pay for support in future? To take heated discussions off from the radar so you are publically vindicated in a classic "hush hush"?

As a paying customer, I am increasingly finding that I've placed my faith in the wrong company. While you may be first-to-market for OS X (Good for you), you are looking like the first to alienate the same userbase you allegedly work so hard to catch. Yes, even as you may be catching more users, you are certainly not going to be keeping them with policies like these that make users pay for features previously promised. Not many want "iPhone support" - that's a big frilly deal and just complicates matters. How about the basic promises that have failed to be delivered?

Do bear in mind the strong US dollar makes this product cost a lot more our currency even at your "discounted rate" - not exactly a cheap upgrade for us, especially an upgrade for what should be promised features in the previous version that have failed to be delivered.

PS: My ticket #612314

 

I want to remind everyone that takes issue with missing features in Parallels 3.x to visit the story on Digg:

http://digg.com/software/Broken_promises_from_Parallels