I’ve finished work for the day so thought I would hang out with people, only some of whom, hate me as light relief.
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This is a false analogy. The correct analogy would be if you called the bank and immediately started complaining about how they don’t pay attention to their customers who refuse to use the ATM machine but prefer a teller. The bank replies with we think you’re ignorant and close minded for refusing to take advantage of our enhanced services, but we respect your right to remain ignorant and close minded. Now how can we help you.
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A relatively small proportion on this forum speak ’sense’, IMO Ged.
For what it’s worth, IMO I think that you’re one of them, and you give a LOT of support to other forum members. Cheers! 
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Maybe I’ll have to buy the download from Linn…
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I could not agree more with you.
I actually paid a service to convert my 50 or so SACDs. Didn’t have the equipment to convert those type of discs. Took a few weeks, but everything came out nicely.
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Linn downloads are generally good quality, i.e. you should be ‘getting what you paid for’ without any dodgy ‘upsampling’ of a lower-resolution file etc.
With Linn, if it says 24/192 ‘on the tin’, then that’s what you should get. This is important IMO.
One more thing to consider is that if you visit any other software forum, you will not find the COO or any other team member posting. I find it astonishing that Danny takes the time to read these posts and even more so that he responds.
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I work at an Energy company and had once been invited to visit the B2C department. They get a lot of complains daily - and not always in a friendly tone.
If one of those employees would give answers to a customer like your examples, two things probably would happen:
the employee gets fired.
The company looses a client
The customer IS NOT always right, but he’s always the customer (until he’s not).
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PS Audio Paul McGowan is on his forum site every day. He responds to people’s questions and criticisms. He has a pretty thick skin too, but will defend his company and is reasonable in his responses. It’s a different crowd, but a fun forum to be at.
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That is probably true, but my point remains that the original statement was a false analogy. I see a lot of that in these forums and it doesn’t serve to further the discussion. It just muddies the water.
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Yep! Copy that!
Companies like Roon & Plex (I use both, and have paid ‘lifetime’ subs to both) rely on customer ‘traction’ & recommendations to advance their business model. I have literally lost count of the number of times that I have recommended Roon on the Linn section on ‘The WAM’ (a small, fairly insignificant forum that Linn Products users were forced to ‘decamp’ to after Linn Products decided to close its own forum in the last-part of last year).
Engagement with product users is truly essential in this age of social media. Personally, I don’t use any form of social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc), but I do use, and enjoy conversing on forums about topics that I’m passionate about. Music, and Roon are two such topics.
‘Hats-off’ to COO’s like Danny @danny and Paul McGowan of ‘PS Audio’, and also people like Rob Watts at Chord for engaging with it’s public in such a proactive way. It will work, and it will ‘pay dividends’.
Conversely, ‘shame on’ companies like Linn, who eschew the opportunity (albeit with some effort involved/required) to maintain a close/good relationship with their customer base. I run a mainly Linn system, with Linn Klimax gear. And it’s great quality. However, this current Coronavius virus will ‘separate the wheat from the chaff’. And I’m sorry to say, that insular, unreachable companies like Linn deserve to wither. Just because they ‘produce physical’ goods, I think they think they’re almost ‘invincible’? How arrogant!
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Conceded. In every interaction that derails into argument, each party usually has an equal opportunity to modify the tone and return it to civility.
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Couldn’t agree more. But if you look at the larger picture, think of the folks who work on the support desk: Dylan, Noris, et. al. I’ve never had anything but the most helpful conversations with them, even when I’ve been pretty dumb about user error. I doubt very much that Danny is speaking for the company in this thread, his title notwithstanding. I don’t judge the whole company by the musings of one blowhard who works there.
I’ve been a software developer for 38 years and I’ve led software teams for 30. Two things about us software developers, particularly the good ones: many of us are kind of emotionally immature, and almost all of us are so used to being told how great we are that we think everyone wants to hear our opinions about everything.
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Danny, as COO, has a fundamentally different role than that of other Roon team members working in customer support etc. He has a much more strategic role - the future. Not today - Tomorrow.
Does he ‘have to agree with customers’? Of course not. Roon does not belong to its customers/subscribers, anymore than Amazon ‘belongs’ to me, as a customer of more than twenty-one-years.
Does Danny have to listen to us? Well, he would be advised to. But as users, does he have to do what we ask/request? Of course not! as. COO he’s responsible for ‘steering the ship’ that we’ll hopefully all still be on in the next few years, to aid our musical enjoyment!
(fwiw my reply below is about generalizations and no longer about anything specific in this thread)
30 year software developer myself, with leadership experience thrown in too, and so I know what you mean. I myself can be emotionally tone deaf, difficult for people to read, and kinda miss the mood of a group sometimes. This, however, is an explanation, or even an excuse, but not a justification. I’d say that software developers, and “software people” in general, can be some of the most emotionally reactive and “prickly” people to work with, precisely because of this tendency to lack of emotional intelligence skills (valuing facts over feelings, semantics over sentiment, etc.). In my personal experience, this stuff can be taught, and expected.
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Nah, I’m not buying it.
That whole thing was just sad. The table made the point very well. But taking it personal just isn’t right. If you are a leader, you stay above the fray. You represent your company, your product, company values and set an example for your staff. As my boss told me “You can’t have a bad day”.
Sure those guys complain. @evand complains a lot and I don’t care for it either. But he also does a lot for Roon, the product. He does it because he cares, I imagine. Kiss that goodbye, for some satisfaction?
So now a point’s been made, great. But its a real bad look. If the guys in support treated customers like that they would get canned. That’s not what leadership is about, at least as I’ve lived it.
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