A message from Creative to the Sound Blaster forum participa

Question

We have read the strong feedback about Creative's forum post regarding driver development by Daniel_k and other outside parties. Creative's message posted on our behalf by our Company spokesperson tried to address our concern about the improper distribution of certain software which is the property of other companies. However, we did not make it as clear as we would have liked that we do support driver development by independent third parties. The huge task of developing driver updates to accommodate the many changes in the Vista operating system and the extensi've testing required, including the lengthy Vista certification requirements for audio, makes it very difficult for Creative to develop updates for all past products. Outside developers have been very helpful to Creative and our customers by developing updates for many of our Sound Blaster products, and we do support and appreciate these efforts. This however does not extend to the unauthorized distribution of other companies' property. We hope to work out a mutually agreeable method for working with Daniel_k in supporting his efforts in driver development. Going forward, we are committed to doing a better job of working more closely with third parties to support their development for our products and our customers.

Answer 1

May I be the first to say:
Thank you for finally responding. :smileyvery-happy:
It may be the beginning of repairing Creative's unfathomably huge PR snafu. Hopefully you guys can pull this one off, starting with this thread. If you can actually take this and turn the whole company around with it, I'm sure many Creative swear-offers may once again return to your products. By turning around, I mean:
- Quit crippling hardware with bad (or intentionally bad) software. Yes, other companies (like nVidia, Intel, AMD, etc...) do this to maintain low production cost, but when it does work, it works well, and their products are branded as "lower priced alternati'ves". Everyone's seen unpopulated component pads on hardware boards, which entices people to want to buy the full featured version. But doing it between operating systems is absolutely ridiculous!
- Support the driver community. Drivers dri've hardware. No drivers, no hardware! Concentrate as much effort on your drivers as you do your excellent hardware, and you will have a high quality product once again. I still love that the old ISA Sound Blasters often had built-in speaker amplifiers. That's a mark of quality and creativity. Hopefully you can do it again!
- Rethink your corporate strategy. Everyone now knows about Creative's history of buying up companies to stifle competition... you've got to quit that stuff. It may give you more capital, but doing it in a Microsoftian fashion is just bound to get you bad press that your company isn't Microsoft-sized enough to handle. Again.
- While Windows Vista may be the worst operating system in existence, that in no way gives you the right to refuse support on older hardware when it's darn well capable of being supported. nVidia and ATI are shining examples of this - they still support their most ancient of hardware in the newest operating systems. That's what's given me the ability to put [url="http://nliteos.com">nLite[/url]ned versions of Windows XP on darn near every computer I come across, and make it run better than ever. You need to quit spewing out excuses and start spewing out working drivers.
- And for crying out loud, your driver self extractor is atrocious. It doesn't need to rattle off the CRC as it computes each byte. I can't be the only person that is annoyed by that
With that, let's see the news flow right on in.
Message Edited by FalconFour on 04-0-2008 09:58 PM