1. Just a follow up and apology.

Someone shared your blog with me, Scott,
and I wanted to follow up.

We did, in fact, respond poorly to your question;
it took a full 12 days for us to respond to you.

I'd like to let you know what happened, and apologize.

The Wine Conference was in Stuttgart, Germany,
this year, and took place on the weekend of April 30th.

You wrote your email on April 27th, which is right
when a lot of our staff (notably including Steven Edwards) got on a plane to head to Germany.

Essentially, our entire company got on airplanes
and went to Germany, with the exception of a
skeleton crew; none of whom have the technical
moxie to answer your question.

What's worse, we had company meetings for a day
or two afterwards. Further, many of our
staff (Steven included), took vacation time
to tour Germany. So we didn't have any developers
back on the ground until about May 6th, and
we were not back at full strength until about
May 9th (actually a bit after), which is when
you finally got your response.

Now, beyond that, there were several further failures.

First, we could have sent you a reply to let you
know that your ticket had been received, and
to let you know why we were all out of pocket.

Second, we did not then go on to offer you a quick
resolution or solution to your problem.

Addressing this latter problem is harder; I will
acknowledge that we failed to address your problem.

Service Pack bugs are a thorn in our side. They
work for us; they work on all versions of Office
we test on; it's something we require. They
work for many of our customers, but not all.

And when they don't work, solving the problem
is a bear. Unless one of the standard tactics
(copying to disk, confirming unhide) works,
we have to have you send us your Office CD
so we can diagnose the problem directly;
that takes several days (or more) of a developers
time and costs you your CD; something most folks
are reluctant to do. Sometimes it gets really
hairy because we'll get someones CD and the
service packs work for us.

And, candidly, this sort of failure does not
keep Office from running, so we prioritize it
a step lower than other concerns, so it doesn't
get as critical attention as other matters.

This is a very hard part of our business;
we get about 20 support requests each day.
The average Wine bug takes about 2 days to
solve, and we have less than 20 developers.
Now many issues are easy to resolve without
a developer, but even still, we feel that our
duty to advance the Wine project is a form
of support and it is our responsibility to
protect our developers so that they can make
broader improvements to Wine. The hope is,
that by doing so, we can be sure to expand the
footprint of what Wine does for everyone.

All of that is an explanation, not an excuse;
I recognize that your service from us was flawed.

I did, however, want you to know that there
are caring human beings behind CodeWeavers
and we are genuinely interested both in
serving our customers and in advancing the
Wine Project.

Cheers,

Jeremy White
CEO
CodeWeavers

Posted at 6:34AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Jeremy White