User perception and marketing bungling
The customer review thread on these Western Digital drives is fascinating. It shows how user perception and screwups by marketing droids can completely ruin the reputation of a product.
Many people in the thread are complaining that the drivers that come with this USB drive don’t work on vista.
Drivers??? For a USB hard drive??? USB hard drives have worked with Windows’ built-in drivers for almost a decade. What gives?
Turns out that it’s not the drivers that are the problem. The problem is that the drive is bundled with Dantz (now EMC) Retrospect Express 6.5, which installs some services & drivers of its own (my guess: shadow copy drivers). Users get told that the drivers don’t work and that they need to contact the manufacturer for an upgrade. Of course, Dantz has long since been acquired by EMC, and Retrospect is on version 7.5 which is the only version they support on Vista. So, customers have to pay more money to get something that works for them. Meanwhile: they think that the drive doesn’t work.
Thus we have a grand comedy of errors. First, we have the perception problem - an app for a device fails installation, so users think that the device doesn’t work. It works just fine, I’m sure, but the app doesn’t. That backup app is the whole reason that the customer bought the product. The customer’s bad experience gets painted on the drive (which may be an excellent product, but we’ll never know).
Then, you have the marketing bungle. Bundling is usually done by the marketing divisions of product companies. Marketing divisions don’t have test groups, and often don’t even think to test the bundled software to see how well it works. WD makes drives; drives work with any application that writes data; so it must just work. ‘Course apps don’t always work with new operating systems. Some marketer probably got a great deal on licensing these old versions and didn’t think about the consequences. Now, an entire product line and company gets blacklisted in many users minds.
All it takes is a few simple mistakes for good products to look bad…
