Working for free is the future of our economy.

I thought the questions were getting stupider...

I tend to agree with Picotrain. It's not right that Asus rely on hobbyists to field tech support of a product they produced. If they had one of their techs answering questions on here, it may be different because we could all benefit, but I don't think that's the case. It creates a false economy if we field their tech support for free.

On the other hand, it doesn't seem like they were planning to offer ANY tech support at all (if you visit their forum, it seems to be unmoderated, although I haven't visited it in many weeks). At least they're not violating copyright.

For myself, knowing that the questions are getting stupider and the newest users (some, but not all) more difficult to help, I am simply becoming more selective about which posts I read and which I bother to answer.

I would demand that sample products, like Eee PC 900s, be sent for testing (and keeping) to all posters with more than 2000 posts at midnight GMT on 22 March 2008.

Just a thought:

If Asus sold cars instead of computers, and people had problems with their new cars, would the same approach work?  Instead of fixing the cars themselves, or even offering them professional advice, they send the customer to a third-party mechanic who enjoys Asus cars, and tinkers with them from time to time.  Asus then expects the mechanic to fix the cars for free, thus Asus' problem is solved.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't know many mechanics who give free advice, and even less who fix cars for free.

deadDuck wrote:

I thought to myself: You can post a message in the forum, so whoever feels confident answering can help you. Then I deleted it.

I receive this infrequently from here and from a Mac site I frequent... I consider this kind of e-mail spamming to be extremely rude and selfish also ...

Personally, I don't think Asus should dish their responsibility on us, although we should be proud of our prominence in the community. Then again, if you did a Pareto analysis, I'm sure you'd find that some 70 or 80% of request-for-help posts on this or any forum fall into the "It is in the manual" or "GFE" areas. In the mechanic analogy, this is the equivalent of someone who comes in for warranty service because they can't be bothered to figure out how their radio tuning knob works. Of the remainder, we handle a lot of tweaking sorts of things, and I don't think it's Asus responsibility to deal with that -- that's purely a community thing.

The final segment is the one I really take Asus to task for ignoring -- things like providing a firmware update to provide more consistent behavior on SDHC cards (at the very least, the ones on their own compatibility list should work ), fixing the network manager they ship with Xandros (with several hundred votes, it appears a good 40%+ have at least some experiences where it refuses to connect to a network), and actually shipping ClamAV in such a state that you need not go and manually delete its config files to make it work (FFS ). Those kinds of things are really their responsibility, but really, aside from adding Skype with video (which I think they did through their official repositories, finally?), they have never done anything really tremendously useful in terms of rolling out updates or fixes.

Also, I got an email(!) from someone (I believe from this forum) saying something like:
My RDesktop doesn't work, it just shows blah blah blah... what can I do?

I get these all the time - several a week from EEEUser.com at the moment. I do what I've always done with such emails - try my best to provide an answer, if it's convenient to do so. I tend to include a line to the effect of posting on the forum, so that (a) greater minds than mine can work on the problem, and (b) so that any solutions are contributed back to the community.



On topic, though, I wouldn't be surprised if we, collectively, have more knowledge about troubleshooting the EEE than Asus - I am sure that their R&D / development guys are better placed to fix issues such as the Wi-Fi bug, but, for day-to-day support, and speed of answer, I'd have thought that we were better and quicker respectively. I'm not saying that this makes it ethically right for Asus to push traffic in our direction, but, on the whole, it's probably better for end users that they do.

It would be interesting to see whether the reverse is true - if the EEEUser.com advice is "return for RMA", whether Asus would take our pronouncement as sufficient to issue an RMA number...

While ASUS is reading this, I'd like to ask for the BIOS source code, schematics, and engineering notes.  To help their customers, of course...

Neil wrote:

"What's that? You can't receive email anymore? But it worked yesterday? Any you can't be bothered to plug in the yellow cable today? Nah - it's not problem. Here, have a ModApproved™ RMA number, and tell Asus that EEEUser.com sent you..."

And thus the birth of a new obnoxious internet phrase: RTFA... Return to ... Asus.

Lazy buggers if you ask me.

Still, we're doing it for the love of their little creation - so isn't it right that they acknowledge us? Hey - maybe they will spend more money on their upcoming range. That's a athought. By providing unofficial tech support, we are helping to contribute to a new line of eee pcs!

If they are going to hand out the new EEEs, they should go to extrEEEme posters only (who are mods).

Hum. Maybe not.... but it would be nice!

Neil wrote:

It is very interesting that Asus either rates our success rate sufficiently to pass their customers in our direction, where, in effect, customers will judge Asus based on the quality of our responses, or else don't care enough to even bother whether our responses are any good.

I think this is the crux of the issue. There's no copyright infringement so there's no real problem. Asus, either knowingly or unknowingly, is staking (part of) their reputation on the quality of our community. I don't think we need feel any obligation to act a certain way for Asus, just because we like their machine. But they are giving us recognition, so I'm not sure they owe us anything more (except maybe demo units!).

Since they were probably never planning to invest any time in their existing forum, everyone is better off for the existence of EeeUser.com. And I'll keep participating until I can no longer spare the time.

Edit: I wonder if Ant's recent trip to Asia included Taiwan and whether or not he had any communication with Asus.

Last edited by deadDuck (2008-03-23 5:13:56 pm)

I still like this idea of giving ExtrEmE users free EeePC 900s... mine in hot pink, pleases?

Asus should at least pay any costs associated with hosting the site.  If it's hosted by a commercial site, they should pick up the tab.  If it's hosted by the owner, they should throw him or her a server (or two for redundancy) and pick up the bandwidth costs...