Windows Developer: Remarkable Experience with Leopard

Apple's developer support had a remarkable surprise for a programmer who had previously worked extensively with Windows and Microsoft, according to a story at .NET Developers Journal.

The story is here: http://dotnetaddict.dotnetdevelopersj.../leopard_beta.htm

"Something rather remarkable happened to me the other day. I was writing some code ... on Leopard. I can't divulge the details of exactly what I was working on because the details of which are still under the NDA," Kevin Hoffman wrote.

Basically, the author had written some code in Objective-C that takes advantage of some of the new features in Leopard. However, the code was unstable. So he sent his source code to Apple and ask for a quick look. After Apple ran the code, and reproduced it, an Apple employee contacted the author.

"Here I am, Joe Shmoe Cocoa Newbie, that has absolutely no business asking people at Apple to waste their time on me, and they went out of their way to not only verify that my code wasn't at fault, but also reproduced the instability, told me what might be causing it, and even sent my project back with a few tweaks and optimizations.
In contrast, the situation according to the author has been quite different with Microsoft. Mr. Hoffman reported, "Any of you reading this who have been inside Microsoft betas know that the experience is quite radically different. There is a faceless "submit" button to which you can send your bug reports, but in all my years of testing Microsoft products, I have never received a reply to any of the bugs I've submitted, let alone confirmation that the issue was truly an issue and not a mistake on my part."

Commenting on customer service, the author had thought that good customer service and feedback to developers just didn't exist anymore. Gone like Dinosaurs. He concluded, "Apparently there are a few traces of good customer service left."