How to annoy your customers -- Native Instruments version

There seems to be a feeling, especially these days, among companies, that, if they have a good product that many people want, they can treat their customers as badly as they want.  In the mid-80’s, I went looking to buy a new car.  At that time, Honda was making a name as a reliable car and many people wanted one.  This was also the time where the import of cars was being restricted in favor of domestic cars.  In short, the American car was not being improved, you just almost had to buy one or wait a long time.  It was in this atmosphere that I walked into a Honda dealer to notice that there was a new line item on the sticker.  It was labeled ‘EDP’ and was a range from $500 to $3000.  It took a while to get the salesman to admit it, but ‘EDP’ stood for Extra Dealer Profit.  Simply, because everybody wanted one, they were going to get as much money as they could.

This brings us to Native Instruments.  They are a German company that creates quality software for music production.  Their emphasis is on sampling, and, despite an obsession with a myriad versions of the piano sound, do put out some interesting stuff.  My favorite has always been Reaktor and I’m growing to enjoy Kinetic Metal.

Native Instruments sells a package of all their software sound constructions called Komplete or Komplete Ultimate.  Never mind how something can be ‘komplete’ without including everything.  Last year I had bought Komplete Ultimate 9 and it was an arduous 8 hour install time.  There’s a lot of stuff there and there were a lot of updates.

So 2015 rolls around and I get a good offer for an update to Komplete Ultimate 10.  Normally I don’t readily do that, but the deal was that good.  The trouble started when I began to install it.

Now, in the time I have been using Native Instrument products, I have noticed that the interfaces seem to be designed to be purposely non-intuitive.  Options are not where you think they should be, named differently or even absent.  I know there will be those who disagree with me.  But moving from other products where I’ve had no problem working with them without training, you definitely need to have the manual ready when dealing with Native Instruments.  And sometimes that doesn’t even help.

Three weeks ago, I decided to install the upgrade and almost immediately things began to go wrong.  The installer (this is for PC, not Mac) resembled a Win 3.1 installer.  Yeah, really.  Well, I set everything to install onto C: when the installer refused due to insufficient space.  Now remember, this is an upgrade, it should have been able to detect that what I had installed already.  Nope, it didn’t.  So, since I had the option, I changed the destination to E: and let it go.  Now the fun begins.  First, it throws an error on one of the applications. It can’t find it and doesn’t allow me to tell it where it is.  All I get is an ‘OK’ button.  I hit ‘OK’ and after a couple of minutes, it can’t find another application.  Same scenario, no options other than ‘OK’.  At this point I figured that this isn’t going to work and that I’ll cancel the installation.  No dice there either, the ‘Cancel’ button is greyed out.  So now I have to wait four hours until the install finishes to see what the damages are.

Note that to this point I haven’t done anything other than use the installer’s options.

Four hours go by and I survey what happened.  Despite the errors, all the applications work, but there is another problem.  Now I have the same content (instrument samples, etc) on both C: and E:.  This should be simple, I’ll just go to add/remove programs and uninstall the old stuff.

Ha-ha, not in your life.  The installer did me a big favor by over-writing the old uninstall files, so now all I have are the uninstalls for the new stuff.

This is what happens when a world-class software house uses a bargain basement installer.  Or could it be that they didn’t configure it correctly?

I’m not proud, so I decide to ask their support for help.  Note that I have contacted Native Instruments support in the past, but support has always been glacially slow or, a couple times, non-existent.  Yes, a couple of times I have contacted Native Instruments support and NEVER got an answer.

So I send an email, list what happened in detail, preface it with a plea to please read the whole email and clearly express my questions at the end.  I asked them how I can uninstall the duplicate content and how can I find where two applications didn’t get updated (the errors).  And, yes, I did make a big mistake.  I actually told them where their installer needed to be improved.

My experience is that you never, ever, tell a German software (or hardware) developer that there might be something wrong.  Because it doesn’t matter what happened—YOU are wrong.

Email sent, I sat down and waited.  Of course, I got the auto-reply that said it may take a couple of days to get back to me, depending on my request.  Basically it meant, don’t expect us to reply at all.

Eight days later, with no reply, I send another email stating that I’ve gone over a week without a reply.

That did the trick, I got a reply.  Of course it was the standard reply with links on how to update my operating system, a link to a Microsoft Fix-it to recover missing uninstall files and a link to Native Instruments on how to install content on an external drive.

As you notice, they are immediately calling me an idiot and essentially telling me to go away.  Nor was there any indication that they realized that they hadn’t answered me for a week.  You’ll also notice that they barely got anywhere near my questions.  I tried the Fix-it, it didn’t work and looked over the content installation, which did not help but almost exactly matched what I did.

I told them the results and asked them where to start.

I get a quick reply back on what to do if I have trouble re-installing.

Huh?

Nothing has been mentioned so far as to uninstalling anything.  Unless I get some detailed instructions, I’m not uninstalling anything because the apps installed over the old stuff, meaning, that if I uninstall, I’ll still have content I can’t uninstall and all my apps will be gone.

That’s where I am.  I replied about not knowing what to do at this point.  Since I sent it on a Thursday, it doesn’t take a genius to understand that I didn’t get any answer on Friday.  We’ll see on Monday.

So there you have it.  A software installer that screws up my system, blame placed on the customer and little to no help.  That’s quality customer service with a capital ‘K’.