Haig, If you Read This, Your Comment Please

[mikiem]

Company Information : Matrox Graphics, Inc Product Information : Graphics Accelerator Cards Contact : BBS: 514-685-6008 Sales: 800-361-1408 Support: 514-969-6320

************* Fax: 514-969-6363***** *****************

Faxback: 514-685-0174 Description : Address : Dorval, QC State : Zip : H9P 2T4 Country : Canada

[frogster]

I emailed my complaint to customer service and they answered it in 2 days.

I told them that I had emailed them before purchasing the g400tv and asked if it would be supported and I would wait another month for the 400etv if it would not be.

CS just responded and said they regret the situation.

It's one thing to have a video card for a couple years and find out the manufacturer is no longer supporting it. it's another thing to have a card for a couple months and find out.

It's especially irritating because I asked them about it.

[frogster]

I also wanted to post something positive.

The Matrox TS people are great. I read through the Matrox forum and decided to buy a Matrox card, in part, due to their knowledge and helpfulness.

[Brian Ellis]

Just to put the things in perspective, I bought a Marvel G-200 within a couple of months of its launch (when they still bundled it with ULead MSP). I had hell's own difficulties at first (later found to be Asus m/b problems) and I sent support two e-mails and a reminder for each. I'm still waiting for an answer. Unfortunately, this has been lost in the mists of time, so I can't give facts and figures, but I have a very long memory when it comes to problems like this.

------------------
Brian (the terrible)

[frogster]

Frankie,

My guess is that they don't want to pay for developing drivers for your card anymore. It costs money to develop drivers and provide technical support on products. Matrox made a decision to cut costs by not providing drivers and support.

[Aryko]

Am I missing something here...?

Two to three years ago, before DV got really big in the consumer market everyone was loving Matrox for the Rainbow Runner and the Marvel products, myself included.

Now Microsoft comes out with Windows 2000, XP, and we see all sorts of compatibility issues... Zoran and MJPEG start to show their age.

Matrox made a product which worked well at the time, and in the system parameters of the day. Get the 5.55 drivers and 1.54 video tools, set up a Windows 98SE box and you're good to go.

- Aryko

[minsight]

I did. I wasn't. I could only tune one channel.

[Frankie G]

Again, on the Marvel G200 and YUY2:
I asked this before in another thread - why no support for
YUY2 under the "real soon now" Win2K Video Tools? Is it
a technical limitation or a Matrox marketing/management
decision? Under VT 1.51 and Win 98 I can capture YUY2 and
feed into HuffYUV, it drops two or three frames a minute
because I only have a PII-400 and one capture disk, but
it does seem to work.
I can keep on dual booting, but it would be nice to have
a "one size fits all" OS.

[zaz]

I just remembered something. Wasn't it about a year ago that matrox had a big campaign about how they were improving their customer support. Some big announcement(s) on their web site is/are what I remember. All this about the time of the last release of the video tools, maybe a month before.

I recall thinking, yeah, right. The several times I had tried to communicate with technical support prior to that resulted in absolutely no reaction from them, except maybe an auto-responder reply to my questions. At least one of the problems I tried to bring to their attention was a well known problem that I hadn't run into the solution for as of the time (installing VT to anywhere but the default installation location).

At the time of the announcement that they were going to be providing better customer support, I decided to wait and see as companies do change. Well, I've waited and saw now and have a pain in my back from bending over the table too long, :-).

Bye, bye matrox, it was ok for awhile, but I ain't bending over the table for you any longer.

[Sciascia]

I'm still running Win98SE with good results. I didn't really mind that the Win2000 dirvers did not work and had accepted that fact a long time ago as I have had the card for several years now. It worked as advertised and I learned alot trying to get it to work right.

Now I said I didn't mind, until they said that they would have drivers and they didn't deliver. That bugs me alot. Especially with WinXP just around the corner. Is MS just throwing out a new OS every year or what? And what are they doing to the multimedia support that is just driving SW developers insane. I thought that all of these new improvements were to make things better, not cripple them. I mean you've got more CPU horespower and instruction sets that do everything but flush the toilet. Where's the improvement? As far as I know ATI is having there own problems with drivers, the G450 has problems and these are the new toys. What gives? It seems like MS has one direction and everyone else lost the map.

If they would atleast offer SW MPEG2 compression for a reasonable price (or atleast make it available as an overpriced option), I think that it would really help take the edge off of the situation. If MJPEG doesn't work in Win2000, then atleast throw us a bone. The no file size limitation would really help a lot.

After all, they did say that they were going to support it. It's bad enough that I have to use SW compression for a card that I expressly bought for it's HW capabilities.

How about a little appreciation for all of the loyal support and patronage from all of us???

[Wyntha]

The root cause of all these complaints can be found in "expectation management" which Matrox appear to lack as a core marketing skill. I'm sure tech. support and the engineers are a great bunch of guys but I bet you it's those marketing types that are the main culprits here. They over sell, create expectations in customer base by coming out with ill-founded promises for the future and then break their promises. MBA marketer's be warned. If you continue like this you'll see your company go down the shoot and your best people bailing out.

[sclark]

Prediction

Matrox is going to go bankrupt. How could this happen?

1. Lie to your customers

2. Promise a product and cannot deliver.

3. Refuse to support your products.

If I worked for Matrox, I would be passing around my resume. If somebody does not try to acquire this once great company it will go under.


[This message has been edited by sclark (edited 13 June 2001).]