Is this a safe place to discuss 'sensitive' matters?

[Skogsgurra]

I need to get your opinion on a situation that I have walked into. It is about a new measurement instrument that has been advertised in a big way but doesn't meet expectations. The software is full of bugs that obviously come from 'cut and paste' when modifying the code to acommodate twice the number of channels. Also, the USB storage does not work with anything but BMP while one expects - and needs - data storage. There are also issues with PC communication and representation on the PC screen. Some data are inverted and som are not. It's chaos.

To me, it looks like this company has fired all software engineers and hired external consultants to 'fix' the migration to more channels. It also seems that there is no software manager to QA the work.

I have told this company that they need to do it all over again. From scratch. They invited me to visit them (on my expense!) and have lunch with them to talk "my" issues over. Hmm, I think it's their problem - not mine. And, I usually get paid for work like this. So I said "Thanks, but this is a bigger issue than that" and refrained from that meeting.

This week, I got mail from them again. Now, they are sending their Marketing Manager and Product Manager to Sweden for a couple of days and want to see me.

In the meantime, I have found many more quirks, bugs and downright stupid things. Also found that the HOLD function (that I used to freeze a waveform that I wanted to transfer to the PC) is reset when I connect to the PC. That rare waveform was lost before I could save it. Should have photografed the screen. But, who could believe that the USB should erase it. Not me. You?

I have discussed this with a few friends and they didn't believe me at first. I let them do what I did and they were very very upset. In view of all ridiculously exaggerated video ads on this device that you can find on the internet, it is amazing what crap you get for your 7000 dollars.

I really want these guys to do it all over again. The hardware is OK, in a way. They have overemphasized things like CAT IV/600 V but that is not an error, just somewhat ridiculous. They also tell the customers to 'connect and view' to check PWM on motors. That is also crap. Especially as the probes they use are specified for 50 V rms at 25 kHz and around 80 V at 10 kHz. An inverter with 10 kHz carrier frequency and 460 V rms motor voltage has a PWM rms voltage around 650 V. Also, the connect and view doesn't work. They can't even make it work in the vieos.

They have no idea of what they are doing, I think. Not much more than marketing people and bean counters left in the company. The situation is quite difficult. What would you do in a situation like this?

And, is this forum enough 'sealed' so we can discuss this thing without leaks that could cause damage?





Gunnar Englund

http://www.gke.org

--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

 

[Skogsgurra]

Mike
Look for videos on that instrument. Not at all difficult to find. When you have seen them, you may then understand that I hesitate to communicate at all with a site that is maintained by people that has so zero understanding for reality. That's why I started this thread - completely neutral. The only moderator is David. And I know David quite well. And I trust him.

Gunnar Englund

http://www.gke.org

--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

 

[zdas04]

I don't see anything in this thread that I would either edit or delete. If it ever goes away it will be because someone asked for it to go away.

If the people knowledgeable in this field want to get into the rest of the details, go for it. Those of us that think you're talking an especially difficult foreign language will bow out.

David

 

[IRstuff]

I disagree that the answers are all no. While you haven't given sufficient information, YET, any further discussion will potentially reveal more information, otherwise, there wouldn't be much to discuss, beyond the generalities you've already given.

And fact, and truth, are irrelevant in a court, to some degree. Even if they eventually lost, I doubt that your personal finances could take the hit of defending yourself in court.

TTFN

FAQ731-376
Chinese prisoner wins Nobel Peace Prize

 

[MintJulep]

Complaints about the performance of products are not exactly rare on the internet.

If your observations were posted out in the open the most likely outcome would be nothing.

The strongest voice you have with the company is your wallet.

Return the thing and demand your money back.

 

[ScottyUK]

A factual review of the product shouldn't give rise to any legal problems, but the review would have to be exactly that - factual. Keep emotion and frustration out of it. Put it on their web site as suggested.

It is sad when a good company loses its way. In my opinion they have expanded and diversified too far from what they were arguably the best at, and this is the result. The alliance with Philips which spawned the first Scopemeter is one example - the Scopemeter was way behind the Tektronix THS scopes of the day, but was better marketed and was a more familiar brand name to the majority. Today perhaps market dominance has resulted in complacency?


----------------------------------

If we learn from our mistakes I'm getting a great education!

 

[Skogsgurra]

MJ

The product can be used. And it is sound in many respects. I also need it. But I cannot trust it. It drives blood pressure. I need to take care so I do not come back home from foreign travels without results. Such a situation would cost more than the instrument. A few times more.

My first problem with this device was when I found out it has insufficient data storage. Its predecessor had ridiculously few storage places, only 15 waveforms could be stored. This new device, that was released end of 2010, still doesn't have more than 15 places. Nowhere in the ads or the specs available before you buy can this be seen. Memory shortage? Today? That is something you wouldn't even care to think about.

Memory is not expensive today. Why disappoint customers like that? Probably because the patch needed to increase number of places was too difficult or just didn't work and management either had no idea or didn't think it was a problem.

It may sound funny, but I find the instrument useful. My USD 7000 that I paid were available and I see no point in getting them back. So, returning it isn't anything I have contemplated. If they could start the SW over from scratch and produce a system that works well and that I can trust, then I would love to have this device changed.

So, I guess that my primary reaction was surprise and disappointment. My second reaction was, I think, another "surprise wave": How can this well-known company fail like this?

The reason I started this thread was because I thought it is an interesting case and also that I needed your opinion. I have received several interesting views already. And I think there will be more.



Gunnar Englund

http://www.gke.org

--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

 

[Skogsgurra]

Yes, Scotty. I also had a THS720, which I loved. I gave it to a friend that needed a scope and I kept the 199. To be honest, I think it was because my customers expected that I should use that instead of the less known THS720. That is where differences in marketing comes in.

I remember customers asking "Why don't you use the yellow scope?" and they were not satisfied when I told them that the "black scope" was just as good - actually better. "Why doesn't ABB use it then?" is a question I got once. That's marketing and ignorance for you.

Gunnar Englund

http://www.gke.org

--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

 

[itsmoked]

1) You guys need to get out more... I think everyone should dump the paranoia about lawsuits, etc. There is nothing going on here that can be legally assailed. Facts are being discussed and what someone could do to improve a product. If lies were being stated and slander about people or a corporation - then perhaps. That's not the case. Skogs, the solid complaints you have I would have no issue posting in the open anywhere - any time.

A new standard is to create YouTube videos of crappy products and include names of the companies, officers, and anyone else associated with them. This is to intentionally stir up the crap. It usually gets immediate results as it's very damaging to the company's image. They can't even bring suit in those cases IF facts are maintained.

I am not suggesting this method in this case.

Moving on.

2) I'm not sure where the opinion, "Everyone with experience has been dumped", came from. That probably isn't the case but rather the new widespread mentality of shopping out parts of product development, causing some disconnects in the big picture of the finished product. I'd stop speculating on the subject as it won't help anything. Who cares really, you just want a effective tool in your toolbox.

3) Skogs; You have a device that almost does what you need. You've gotten the company's attention. This is rare. This is good! Do you want your scope improved? Seems like you do. I'd keep my eye on the ball - not on my wallet. Starting off with suggestions like you should be compensated, appear as greed, and unpleasantness. They cause my skin to crawl. They're like a huge, loud, poisonous, fart at a funeral service. Without some relationship they don't know if you're a jerk, an angry scammer, or a guy with an axe to grind.

They suggest you come and meet with them? I suggest your attitude should be, "I'd love to! But I can't afford it."

They come back that they'll come to you!?! I'd give them a day of my time, especially if I thought it would result in an improvement to a tool I'd love to have work better. They appear to be serious about improving their product. They aren't experienced field engineers, they don't really understand everything you need from the tool. I submit that if you help them they'll be grateful. It will pay you dividends.

4)
List all the problems with the scope.
List any marketing issues you know of.

Talk to them. You're personable and earnest, they will listen.

Talk with the marketing person if he comes. Products are driven by marketing. If marketing becomes more knowledgeable about user expectations and needs, it can only help.

I'll guarantee you that if the company is willing to send people to you, they're going to be listening very closely to what you have to say - they already are. You'll also be the guy who gets the rev'd unit for your approval. Isn't having the unit perform to your requirements the entire point here?

Cheerio!






Keith Cress
kcress -

http://www.flaminsystems.com

 

[Ron]

I stand corrected. It wasn't hard to find, as hokie66 noted.

LPS for Keith...nicely said.

 

[Skogsgurra]

Keith

"Isn't having the unit perform to your requirements the entire point here?"

Yes, it was. But I have so much input now that I don't know what to do. I need to digest.

New thoughts have grown in my head. As you know, Jim Williams died from a stroke. Strokes are caused by high blood pressure.

Jim was also a scope fetischist. He was working with high power electronics and the scope we are talking about has many properties that makes it ideal for such work; four channels, isolated inputs, high bandwidth. This scope was released recently (relatively).

I do not think that it is too far fetched to see a possible connection between the quirks of this scope and building blood pressure. The rest is speculation. But if there is a connection - I want to see blood.

Gunnar Englund

http://www.gke.org

--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

 

[jraef]

Gunnar,
The issue of the probes is something that scares me. I would not have thought twice about using their product and being so exposed to risk, that's really bad news for them. Hey, maybe it's just design fluke eh?

Talk "that company" into hiring you to come over and show them how to re-make it. When they do, let me know and I'll fly up there and give you a tour of the area, I lived there for 12 years. We can call for a Pub Meeting too, I think there are other members in the area.

 

[MikeHalloran]

Okay, maybe I am associating my own problems with this.
Example: My Philips home theatre, which cannot manage to eject a DVD unless it's in DVD playing mode. Switch it to radio, or tv, and the eject button stops working.

That's clearly an artifact of a formal, and stupid, software development process. Which evolved as a way of relieving programmers from any responsibility for the product actually working, much less working as the user would like it to work. Another pet peeve of mine.

Ideally, Fluke would assign a couple of their best hardware and software hackers, assuming they can still be found, to work with Skogs, and produce at least one SkogsScopeMeter, which will behave exactly as Skogs expects it to. That's the entire spec for the product.

If they are smart, they will record all interactions and assign a documentation specialist to produce a formal spec, which will then become the spec for an eventual greatly improved product.

I doubt they're that smart, but give them a chance.


Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[catserveng]

Gunner,

You defined a need, you researched based on available information, you made a purchase, it didn't meet you expectations. It does partially what you need it to do, but you're not satisfied. I agree, if you are in this business you need good tools, if you spend good money you expect the equipment to do what you need. You are also in a part of the business that requires you to communicate your findings with others, so the importance of some of the features may be more of a driving force for you than for a technician who looks at the screen, makes a decision and moves forward with a repair/adjustment/calibration.

It seems Fluke has moved towards making people who use their equipment look smarter than they are. I am looking at their vibration analyzer right now and not too happy with it, before I dump 8k USD on it I want to know it will do what I want. Their marketing guy here wants to know why I haven't bought it yet, same kind of issue, put I haven't actually spent the money. Yep, has lots of features, but not the features I want as yet.

I own a LOT of their stuff, from the small voltage detector to a 1750 with all the attachments, and a large list in between, almost looks I'm a sales rep for them when I'm out. I have had three occurances where what I bought didn't live up to expectations, on two of them we came to some form of agreement, on one I kept it a couple of years then sold it on eBay.

I think your opinion has significant value, how the information is shared and how you present it seems to be the challenge. But getting spun up doesn't help. But honestly, I'd be pissed and probably not so diplomatic as you are trying to be. I'd just call my distributor and tell him the POS isn't what they claimed, how is he going to help me do my job with his product in my hands?

Mike L.

 

[waross]

A point that we may be drifting away from.
The point is NOT that the product does not live up to Skoggs' expectation.
The point IS that the product DOES NOT live up to the advertised features.
As for legal implications;
Don't forget that there may be a case for a group action suit against the company by owners of the instrument. The possibility of a class action suit by a group of customers who have been duped out of $7000 with fraudulent adds is a much greater threat to the company than anything that may be mentioned here.
Oh, and on the issue of fraudulent advertising, a cell phone service provider in Canada has just been fined $10,000,000 for misleading advertising, plus the expenses of the investigation.

http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1016273--bell-canada-to-pay-10m-fine-for-misleading-ads?bn=1

A Bell spokesman said the telecom company disagrees with the decision but agreed to resolve the issue rather than going through a lengthy and costly legal challenge.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/glob...10-million-for-misleading-ads/article2079066/

Although Bell said it “fundamentally disagrees” with the bureau’s findings, it has agreed to pay the considerable sum and align its “non-compliant advertising,” as well as pay an additional $100,000 to cover the cost of the agency’s investigation.

Two suggestions,
1> Ask the gentlemen if they have sold any units in Canada. Then absent yourself for a few minutes (see to coffee and cookies in the kitchen) with printouts concerning Bells troubles left on the table.
2> Don't accept any non-disclosure agreement that limits your right and/or ability to later join a class action suit against the company.
I hope that it goes well for all concerned. A Win-Win situation would be a fix that benefits both the company and Gunnar.

The big picture is quite simple. Just make the unit perform as advertised. The devil is in the details.


Bill
--------------------
"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter

 

[Skogsgurra]

Thanks Bill. There's more to this than I first thought.

I have had a look at the marketing videos. They are so full of mistakes that I feel embarassed and wonder why they were made at all. One of the more embarrasing is the one on Connect&View where there's so much noise in the signal (ground clip loose?) that you never get a good screen. And on motor voltage (PWM) the C&V never locks. The speaker voice hastily moves on to next waveform without commenting the failure. The part where the speaker voice says "it takes hours to get a stable waveform on a bench scope" when the C&V fails to trigger on that noisy signal is hilariuos and we have had very good laughs. Any of us wouldn't use more than a few seconds to find the right settings.

Gunnar Englund

http://www.gke.org

--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

 

[KENAT]

OK, didn't read everything above but I'm confused.

Do you have an NDA with these folks? Or some kind of long term relationship you don't want to damage or anything in anyway similar?

In some of the software forums there are threads complaining about features of the software, or bugs, or improvements they'd like to see.

Why so much concern over who sees this one?

What am I missing here?

If you'd bought a new car and it didn't live up to the advertising would you be so concerned about confidentiality when discussing the flaws?

Are you just concerned about going 'public' before your meeting with their Marketing Manager and Product Manager?

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[Skogsgurra]

KENAT

This is not just a bug, a flawed function, a quirk or anything like that.

It is a set of groups of different problems. I think that I shall try and list the categories below. I may need that myself:

A. My original problem was that there are not enough storage space in the scope. The predecessor 10-15 years old had 15 places to storw waveforms. The new scope has the same number of storage spaces. I have work where at least 200 waveforms are taken in one day and around 700 for the whole job.

B. But, there was a USB connector so data could be stored on a stick. That does not work. All I can store is BMP, no waveform data. That does not help me.

C. Even if the USB stick had worked as required, it would be almost impossible to use it because everytime you chose USB storage, give the file a name and store it - the scope resets to INTERNAL memore and default file name. So you have to do that selection, naming, storing over and over again. Also, the communication with the USB is very slow, it really slows your job down if you try to use that feature.

D. There's a set of quirks. I have probably not seen all of the yet. One is that the scope suddenly locks up completely. Have to remove battery to get it going again. I have discussed this with the technical marketing director and he says it is a known software problem but that "it has only happened one time during several hours of testing". It happened to me during the first few hours of use. I have his explanation in writing and I think it would have been better if he hadn't admitted that the problem was known. There are other funny things going on. If I invert channel B then MOVE C moves the baseline tyhe wrong way. A typical cut-and-past phenomenon. The screen says 20 kHz bandwidth when full bandwidth has been selected and risetime on the scope also shows that full BW is active. I can't list all here. But there's a lot of those things. Indicating that the SW has been patched to handle four channels. But not developed for this scope. The QA does not exist. Wonder if the ISO 900x has been considered at all.

E. Communication with the PC is painful. I sometimes have to restart the PC, sometimes the scope a few times before they communicate. When I pull the USB connector, the screen still says that there is a connection and when I try to download waveforms from the scope, the software starts doing so. It doesnt tell me that the connection is broken. Complete chaos.

F. When I recall a waveform from internal memory (yes, the 15 internal stores work) and then fetch the screen to the PC, it looks like it does on the screen. If I then fetch the waveform (same data) they are not at all the same. If I have inverted a channel to get the right polarity on screen, that inversion does not show in the data. That makes it difficult to write a report using the waveform data. Lots of manipulation to get it right. File names exist in duplicate, there is no way of telling which one of SCOPE1 I shall download because there is NO DATE and NO CLOCK information available. What about data integrity and tracability?

G. The organization on the whole is clueless. Look at their videos on Youtube. They cant even make the Connect&View work in their marketing material. They talk a lot about CATIII/IV, but use probes that cant take more than about 80 V rms (according to the derating chart in their manual) at 10 kHz while the voltage can easily be 650 V or more. All that dressed up in 'moon-walker' protection gear. But only the guy holding the scope. The other people walk around in short sleeves and jeans. The ads are parodic. Have a look at them. Not at all difficult to find.

I think I will stop here. There's more. And there are certainly things that I havent seen yet.

I think that you understand why I hesitate to bring this up in broad daylight. It is simply too much and I felt that I needed some ideas from you before talkin to the manufacturer. And I have got quite a lot of input. I am grateful for that.



Gunnar Englund

http://www.gke.org

--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

 

[KENAT]

Some of the software packages have had big changes at one point or another that generated a lot of comments etc. in the relevant forums and none of that was done confidentially.

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[Skogsgurra]

OK?

Gunnar Englund

http://www.gke.org

--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

 

[patprimmer]

There is a difference between saying:-

1) I am not happy about aspect XXX of performance and I would like to see it improved.

2) This software has bugs.

3) This software is not as good as the previous version.

4) This company seems to have lost its way or touch with the market.

5) This company is committing the crime of fraud in its advertising.

Depending of course on jurisdiction, and remembering I am not a lawyer, but in my opinion, point 5 may very well get you in trouble with the law whereas points 1 to 4 would not.

Regards
Pat
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