Comment by mort96
10 hours ago
The official replies started off by addressing ... the "unacceptable abusive behavior towards AMD". The most important thing here is obviously to ask people not to use such hurtful words as "disgraceful" towards poor little AMD...
Answering the actual question seems not a high priority
Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset? Especially when to company has just announced changes that limit what users can do with their products.
The older I get the less I want to deal with companies that act like primadonnas and the technologies they make. This is also why I don’t do phone apps: your market access is 100% controlled by two companies that can wipe out your business overnight.
Imagine having to work with these people professionally. With real money involved. While probably not as high risk as mobile development, their customer representatives seem like real primadonnas. You’ll be happier without these people in your life.
> Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset?
I’m actually fully in favor of empowering customer-facing representatives to put reasonable limits on responding to customer abuse.
It should not be the job of a forum moderator to take abuse. Warning them about the rules of the forum and then enforcing the rules is forum management 101. It’s getting silly that people are attacking this person specifically for just doing their job.
> I’m actually fully in favor of empowering customer-facing representatives to put reasonable limits on responding to customer abuse.
That's not the question that was asked.
Neither calling a company's actions disgraceful nor anything else in the posts that triggered that official reply were abusive to customer service.
3 replies →
When a company screws over entire segments of their customers people get angry. And they don’t get less angry when their frustration is belittled by someone how essentially says “your dissatisfaction means less to us than the words you choose to describe it”.
_Professionals_ de-escalate. This was not that.
2 replies →
> Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset
Typical phone CSR boilover from covid days. Most places I call these days have a message saying that they will hang up on you if you act pissy.
> have a message saying that they will hang up on you if you act pissy.
When I had some influence over customer support at a company once I set a similar expectation. We didn’t advertise it up front but if a customer was being abusive over support channels they could be cut off.
Big morale boost for customer support. Abusive customers are rare but they can think it’s their job to attack, threaten, and be uncivil. Being stuck in a position where you’re forced to placate angry man-children sucks.
It’s sad that there are so many comments here trying to attack the forum moderator for moderating the forum.
This person had no hand in the decision making. No reason to treat them as an outlet for anger.
2 replies →
Seems we have an awful lot of snowflakes in the corporate tech world the last couple years. Can’t take criticism, can’t handle basic questioning of their operation …
That is why techbros cannot make it in politics. I was actually impressed with Zuckerberg: he knows how to wear a suit and did not crumble when EU parliamentarians questioned him.
Yeah that was hilarious, pretty much instantly closed the tab when I read that.
Oh please mister, won't you please think of the little billion dollar corporation's feelings? They're only poor corporations with nothing to their names but their billion dollar businesses! Won't you think of the starving corporations?!
> Answering the actual question seems not a high priority
This is a clear sign of propaganda and bullshitting by them. Because answering the actual question would be easy, unless you deliberately want to harass linux users. Perhaps a Barbara Streisand effect kicks in, because people are now sharpening their ears and eyes as to why they harass linux users specifically.
I also have to admit that while my main operating system is linux, on my left side I have a windows computer too. I found this approach more practical, even though I think Linux is far superior to windows. This abuse by private entities to try to force everyone to use winows, is anonying to no ends though.
Some people, including the management of most big corporations, claim that verbal insults, which do no actual physical harm to anyone, are "unacceptable abusive behavior", while the actions that do physical harm to others, e.g. by tricking or forcing them to pay an extra part of their hard-earned money for things that should not have been paid, because they had already been paid in another form, instead of using that money for worthy purposes, are not "unacceptable abusive behavior".
Obviously, I believe that a decision like that made by AMD now is a much more "unacceptable abusive behavior" than any kind of verbal insult ever known to mankind.
This kind of decision is a masked price rise of the AMD FPGAs that applies only to small businesses and individuals, while the big quasi-monopolistic companies are not affected, which will make competing with them even more difficult.
What annoys me most about this kind of policies aimed to hurt small businesses and individuals and favor big companies, which have become more and more frequent, is that in most cases they do not provide any financial benefit whatsoever to the company that enacts them, because they limit competition not in the market where that company activates, but in related markets.
However such policies are very beneficial for the entire class of people who are major shareholders, board members or executives in big companies, by ensuring that all markets are eventually dominated by few, which has happened especially after the end of the nineties of the past century, resulting in the current unhealthy economies of the Western countries and especially of USA.
This success of the quasi-monopolies has been caused by the lack of truly adequate consumer protection laws.
I agree with your point (that AMD does a lot more harm than what they are indignant about) but not the way you go there. If emotional abusive behavior is not "physical harm" because it's just emotions, then financial abusive behavior is not "physical harm" either because it's just numbers. When you consider what incredible harm being emotionally unwell can lead to, I don't think it deserves to be dismissed.
AMD is clearly just putting on a performance here though, using the backlash they get as a weapon.
Yea insulting and being verbally abusive towards individuals is something that it's worth taking action against. My problem with AMD's response is simply that they take issue with "bad language or abusive behavior towards AMD".
It would be more accurate to say that what AMD is doing is causing material harm, while a few mean words directed towards an anonymous megacorp are not.
The replies here are horrifying. Yes corporations are not people. But they are made up of people. I'd imagine most here work in them yourselves. Often less well paid support staff who have to read, and try to respond, to such terrible behavior. As one of those support people myself I can assure you it takes a toll.
1 reply →
AMD is not a person. It has no emotions. Any perceived emotional harm by humans is them projecting themselves onto the AMD entity. Whereas AMDs actions here cause real harm to individuals.
3 replies →
Its just numbers only for rich. For poor ir can be the differnce between employability and not. In general, I believe that non-free tools like this are effective violence against poor nations since they trap those societies in unskilled sectors.
> claim that verbal insults, which do no actual physical harm to anyone, are "unacceptable abusive behavior"
Which is true in a vacuum. Insulting _people_ is abusive behavior and shouldn't be accepted.
The issue here is the posts aren't insulting people, they're insulting a company, and a company can't be mentally abused.
There are still individuals, who make up the company, who have to read and try to formulate responses to said abusive behavior. It's usually the lower paid support staff not the engineers or C suite who have those duties. As one of those people I can confirm it absolutely takes a toll.
1 reply →
I'll come your place of work and hurl abuse at you all day. Let's see if you find it harmful or not by the end of the week.
I don't know anything about this situation, but basic logic says if you want someone to give you free stuff, be nice to them.
It wouldn't surprise me if AMD is scaling back their free offerings due to the impact on support.
> It wouldn't surprise me if AMD is scaling back their free offerings due to the impact on support.
They’re welcome to hamstring themselves in the market; it’s just not a smart move.
Who are the alternatives to Xilinx on the high end currently? Altera? Lattice and the others make comparatively small FPGAs IIRC.
Probably a good thing I don't run a company, because I wouldn't put energy into responding to the kind of comments they're addressing. If you use a support channel the same way a teenager uses Reddit, you should count to ten and try again later.
That said, the tone and basic grammar of AMD's support rep isn't what I would've expected either.
They did answer the question, though:
> AMD expectation is that the BASIC tier licensing level is used for simple, entry‑level needs. While more advanced, production-based workflows are aligned with paid tiers.
In other words, they're saying hobbyists and beginners are on Windows anyway, and students can get a free version if they apply through the right channels. No more freebies.
AMD wants people to pay for their software. Instead of going "why are you bullying Linux users", AMD customers should probably be going "thank god the Windows version is still free (for now)"
You're kind of doing the job for them here by inventing a connection between Linux and "simple, entry-level needs". Plenty of Linux users have "simple, entry-level needs"; nothing about using Windows automatically makes you needs simpler. If that is indeed their argument, they ought to have spelled it out.
> In other words, they're saying hobbyists and beginners are on Windows anyway
I suspect they're massively underestimating how many hobbyists and students are on Linux. We're not talking about a typical demographic here, we're talking about people interested in computers and technology at precisely the level that Windows and MacOS aim to isolate from the user.