Parallels CEO Defends Parallels Desktop 4…. Claims A “Couple Of Dozen” Users Are Ruining The Party
Yes, I know that the title isn’t grammatically correct, but I wanted to use Serguei Beloussov (Parallels’ chief executive) exact quote. Basically, in this ComputerWorld article, he says that Parallels Desktop 4 is a quality product and that a “Couple Of Dozen” users who frequent the company sponsored support forums are giving the world the impression that it’s not:
Beloussov maintained that it was a very small group — “a couple of dozen,” he said during the interview — who are posting negative comments about the upgrade on the company’s support forums. “It’s actually quite a small number who are getting upset,” he argued. “I have engineers coming to me who are asking ‘Why do we get this reaction? There are only a few people making noise, and there are no real problems, only problems of perception.'”
“Happy customers don’t go to forums,” Beloussov maintained. “And lots of [problems reported in the forum] have been resolved in Desktop 4.”
Now that’s 100% true. Happy customers just use a product and don’t say a word. Customers with problems scream from the rooftops. That’s true for any product. I’ll also note that Parallels doesn’t censor its support forums like Apple has been known to do:
“We do not moderate our support forums,” Serguei Beloussov, Parallels’ chief executive, said on Tuesday, referring to the practice of monitoring, and sometimes purging, user comments. “We became a victim of our own open policy.”
I’ll applaud them for not zapping negative comments as it takes balls to stand up there and take shots like that. But I think they need to do more. I think they need to do what Comcast has done and reach out to disgruntled users and fix their issues. I also think that they need to adequately explain the fact that a pre-release version of the software might have slipped out to users. Plus in general, they need to increase their customer service efforts generally as you have to pay money to talk to a live human being, which is a big deterrent in terms of dealing with issues from an end user perspective.
The fact is that from where I sit, this release does everything it claims to. It’s faster and more stable than the previous version. Plus the graphics support is better. I really think Parallels has a winner here. But if they don’t get a handle on what the public perceives, then they might as well hand over this market to VMWare.
December 9, 2008 at 3:26 pm
It ruined my Vista image and I STILL cannot get it to work with a new image. DONT UPGRADE IF YOU HAVE NOT ALREADY!!!!!!!!!!!
January 23, 2009 at 4:17 pm
I can say they do in fact support censoring. I’ve recently replied to a comment where someone asked about their experiences using version 4 – and I honestly said that if you start from scratch, the experience is okay. If you UPGRADE an existing image things can go horribly wrong and to make sure they backup their data first.
The forum is moderated and my post never showed up. A number of others did that weren’t critical to Parallels.
I won’t call the CEO a liar – only that he’s probably mis-informed about the judgments made by his staff that monitors their discussion forum.
As a customer? Since I have to re-create from a scratch the image I have foolishly upgraded to version 4 and based on their lack of responsiveness to the NUMEROUS issues logged about the upgrade – I’ll be moving back to VMWare. At least the support environment there is wider and has a greater depth of users.
Thanks!