Creative Labs

[PhilB66]

Creative Labs customers might want to read this thread. Warning. It's a monster thread.

[f0dder]

Creative support has always been... creative.

customer: "Hi, I have a problem with my audigy - whenever I use it in my dual-cpu machine, windows BSODs randomly after bootup."
creative support: "umm, are you saying you actually got windows to *boot* with our drivers on a dual-cpu machine?"

[ChalkTrauma]

I gave up on Creative years ago after they continuously abandoned support on every product over a year old, and provided drivers and software that worked only part of the time for the new stuff. I can safely say they have caused me more grief than any other hardware vendor hands down.. For my new box I ended up buying a Auzentech HDA soundcard and I never looked back. I have so many other sources of pain why add another, Creative deserves a healthy dose of Kharma..

[Renegade]

Holy mother!

That's insane!

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...

[jgpaiva]

At the very least, i recognize something good in creative: They didn't delete the negative comments the user posted at that thread.
There are a lot of companies which enforce censorship in their forums (linksys being the most obvious i can think of now) and delete anything that might prove the nasty company they are.

[Dormouse]

Warning. It's a monster thread.

Currently 2274 posts. Viewed 275,504 times.
And I bet they are all saying the same thing.
Certainly makes my decisions about soundcards and speakers easier.

[CWuestefeld]

I read through a bunch of it. Is there any reply from Creative beyond the first page? The "me too"s got boring, but I'm interesting in seeing if there's any official response.

[oldfart]

I read through seven or eight pages and the last one and the only responses I saw from Creative were to questions and concerns posted by the fellow they censored and that mainly focused on exactly which of his mods were still acceptable and which weren't and from what I read, it sounds like they ditched all his threads.

[PhilB66]

The Website boycottcreative.COM was created on 30032008. Warning. The Image below may upset some (non)creative customers 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[attach]

[f0dder]

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...

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.

For my new box I ended up buying a Auzentech HDA soundcard and I never looked back.

Are they any better, and is it a separate company? I know they use creative hardware parts...

[CWuestefeld]

I think that there are two problems going on at the same time, and it's clouding the issue. On the issue of IP rights, I don't think that there's any question that Creative has the law on their side.

As a separate issue, if I understand correctly, Creative has sold to people sound cards that are promised to have certain features. These operate OK in XP, but are locked out when the customers upgrade to Vista. Depending on the nature of the advertising that promised those features, the affected customers may have legitimate complaint about fraud on Creative's part.

The fact that Creative (may have) committed fraud does not invalidate their IP rights.

On the other hand, legalities and ethics are two different things. Creative seems to be within their legal rights, but (again, AIUI) their behavior seems strongly unethical. This is ample reason to refuse to use their products. But it's not going to keep the guy who modded the drivers out of court.

[f0dder]

Creative have always been bastards - dropping support for "old" products very early, bankrupting Aureal3D (who had a product superior to botchy EAX), not providing proper drivers, et cetera.

[ChalkTrauma]

Are they any better, and is it a separate company? I know they use creative hardware parts...

I have had much better luck with the Auzentech's stuff, but then again it was Creative's drivers/software I always had a problem with; the hardware never failed on me outright. So if Auzentech buys parts and writes decent drivers/software, that works for me.. I believe they are a separate company..

[f0dder]

As long as they're as separate company and write their own drivers

[Lashiec]

Semi-fixed, although the damage has been inflicted already, with people tearing apart his/her X-Fi and everything.

Add to that the release of the new Asus Xonar DX sound card, that emulates EAX5 (don't know how true is to the source, though, reviews are forthcoming), and I say Creative is in a pretty bad shape regarding it sound card business. And they're not doing much better in their other fields of expertise. Bad karma I guess, considering their history.

[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...

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.

This is why:

Phil O'Shaughnessy
VP Corporate Communications
Creative Labs Inc.

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

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:

[attachthumb=#]

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.