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Creative Labs

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f0dder:
Damage is done - I know I'll never buy a Creative soundcard again. In fact, I decided to scrap my old Audigy in favor of onboard sound for my new box, to avoid driver trouble (XP64) and have more airflow in my case. If there had been less EMI noise on the Audigy than the onboard sound I would have kept the Audigy, but there wasn't.

Renegade:
Think Phil O'Shaughnessy will get fired for that? Cause he's really done a LOT of damage, especially considering his position. Not handled very well at all... :(-Renegade (April 01, 2008, 01:38 AM)
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Why would he? If they do it as a desperate attempt of damage control, then that has HYPOCRITES stamped all over it, since he just represents official corporate decisions.
-f0dder (April 01, 2008, 09:10 AM)
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This is why:

Phil O'Shaughnessy
VP Corporate Communications
Creative Labs Inc.
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He totally dropped the ball in how he wrote that up. For a Vice-President of Corporate Communications to botch things that badly... Yikes! He should know better.

He should have first emailed Daniel Kawakami without dragging things out into the public eye. Failing that, in an open forum, something a bit more palatable would be in order. I'll write up a quick sample here:


Hello Daniel Kawakami,

While we appreciate your efforts to extend support for Creative products through modded drivers, Daniel, I unfortuneately need to request that you stop distributing certain packages. Please allow me to explain.

Though most of the technology in our drivers is directly from us here at Creative, we also license technologies from other companies and those licenses come at significant expense and with certain restrictions. We are not really at liberty to use those technologies in some product lines. When you repackage those technologies for use in products that they are not intended for, you create tension between us and our technology vendors, which can damage our ability to negotiate with them in the future. This can lead to higher prices for Creative products, which we'd of course like to avoid. It is our goal to provide a good product at a good price.

It is not our goal to stop you from assisting people that use Creative products with issues on Windows Vista, or to make unreasonable demands of you. We only request that when you distribute modded Creative driver packages, that you consider the intellectual property issues behind them and act accordingly.

Should you need help with legal issues, I would be happy to provide you with contact information here at Creative.

Again, your support for the community is appreciated.

yadda yadda yadda


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That's a quick writeup, and certainly isn't something that I'd publish, but it's a step in the right direction. The tone is what matters.

The point is that it's possible to say things in a way that makes people feel good, even when the news is bad. Phil didn't do that. He went out and got all aggressive towards someone that he should have been expressing gratitude for. "No good deed goes unpunished." Seems very true at Creative, and now they're paying for it.

But you may be right about the hypocritical thing there.

IainB:
I was searching for some soundcard-related material in my Scrapbook library today, and came across the original post on the CL forum that apparently started this fiasco on 2008-03-28:

Creative Labs

I never did follow-up this fiasco at the time, so, out of interest, I did a quick search today and established that:

* The discussion thread of 242 pages appears to have been expunged from the forum at http://forums.creative.com/
* The discussion looks as though it is intact on Wayback (at the moment, but presumably that could always be "fixed" by history rewriters) - starting here.
* There is nary a mention of the episode on Creative Technology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (must have been "fixed"/edited out?).
* Wayback has a copy of the mirror website that had been set up and a ZIP file(s) of the mirror, intact via: http://web.archive.org/web/20080403010018/http://creative.edited.us/ (the mirror itself appears to be defunct.
* The LinkedIn summary for Phil O'Shaughnessy (the author of the post) indicates that he was at CL from 1999 through to 2013, starting as a PR Manager and rising to Vice President, Corporate Communications. He is currently Director Global Corporate Communications at IGT.
I'm unsure of whether this unfortunate fiasco adversely affected CL's business/profitability, as some reports seem to indicate that it had already been experiencing financial problems at the time.

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