Hi everyone,
We want to start by apologizing for any bad experiences you have had with MOTU products. You, our users, are the most important people in the world to us. Every time our hardware, software, or support lets you down, we’ve failed at our job as engineers. So far, you have raised issues ranging from difficulty getting support to persistent bugs to unreliable hardware.
We want to make things right. With this post, we want to create an open discussion and direct conduit between you, our engineers and QA. Let’s fix the issues that are getting in your way so you can focus on the things that really matter--putting up awesome shows without a hitch. I hope we can earn back your trust, eventually.
As a quick introduction, Brian Choi and I will be fielding any questions you have and working to tackle problems that you’ve encountered. Brian is the head of QA and tech support. I’m a lead developer for Digital Performer. If we can’t solve an issue ourselves, we’ll make sure another engineer does.
The issues raised so far by Andy, Jim, and others seem to fall into roughly three categories: lack of responsiveness; driver bugs; and unreliable hardware. So we are all on the same page, I want to take a second to bring you all up to speed on the current state of things. We have made improvements on all of these fronts recently, but your help and feedback will be invaluable in truly solving these problems.
We’ve made recent, substantial changes to improve our support infrastructure. We added a hold queue a few years back which means no more busy signals when calling tech support. We completely overhauled our support department over the past two years. There have been growing pains as we’ve worked back up to our capacity, but we decided it best to take that plunge to improve the quality of our support. We are currently adding more tech support staff to further improve response time. At our current staffing levels, measured wait times are the shortest they’ve been. As well, you’re hopefully getting more helpful responses. If you’ve had a different experience recently, please let us know.
QA, tech support, and engineering are talking more now than ever over the past year. This has strengthened the connection between you, tech support, and us engineers. For instance, we added our own crash reporter to Digital Performer that sends reports directly to us. It has helped us fix a number of major problems facing our users. That said, we still need to do more.
We’ve been working hard to improve our Windows driver support recently. We want your feedback on these improvements but also assistance diagnosing and fixing any remaining issues, such as the MTC woes that Andy mentioned. With your help, we are confident we can fix the problems.
As per John Huntington’s request, I just made all downloads on MOTU.com public. You no longer need to login or even register to download drivers or updates.
Lastly, we have made steps to improve our hardware reliability. Within the past year, we redoubled our efforts on QA. As a result, we’ve measurably reduced the rate of return and failure on both new and refurbished units.
Think of Brian and myself as your direct help hotline! We will strive to restore your trust and support. Please let us know of any and all issues you are having or have had with MOTU products and we will do our best to address them. We are here representing MOTU--ask us anything!
Thanks,
Michael Miller
Lead Developer, Digital Performer
MOTU
Brian Choi
Head of QA and Tech Support
MOTU
