I'm just going to come right out and say it... Someone at PTC needs to be fired. Apparently no one bothers to do their job anymore. What happened to accountability, attention to detail, customer service, and "going the extra mile" to make a good impression?
These are dying and outright dead concepts, aren't they?
Early today I opened a ticket with PTC Customer Support wondering why the Learning Connector (which was working recently) suddenly stopped working. The cause- Internet Explorer 11. That I can find, this information is available nowhere on PTC's website. This is maddening.
So Internet Explorer 11 for Creo 2.0 M100 is "supported" but not for the Learning Connector? We're using Creo 2.0 M100 and we expect that means all available services will also work with this tool.
Internet Explorer 11 was released on October 17, 2013. That's nearly a year ago... yet PTC was somehow caught flat-footed getting the Learning Connector to work with this browser? I guess Microsoft "sprang" it on them.
Ah- but certainly I'm just being a big jerk expecting PTC to keep in step with every release of Internet Explorer. I'm displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of the rigors and complexities of releasing software in the modern age, aren't I? I'm surely just being a fool, right? Way back on October 26, 2012, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 10 for general use. Of course the blasted Learning Connector must work for IE 10, right? Not according to customer support! The support tech tried to talk me into downgrading to Internet Explorer 8. I am not making that up. IE8 was released on March 19, 2009!
This is just unacceptable.
Integrated availability of help, training, and custom content was a major pillar of Creo 2.0's "ease of use and adoption". How in the world can this be flubbed so badly? And more importantly, how does this kind of thing keep happening. If Steve Jobs ran PTC, heads would roll for such epic fumbles.
I won't even bother going off on the rant of epic proportions Creo/Windchill interoperability has coming. An entire team of people need to be fired for that mess.
For things like this, someone really and truly needs to be fired.
Yes, fired. Not reprimanded. Not given a negative performance evaluation with ample opportunities for corrective action. Not retrained... just fired. Someone from HR needs to arrive at their desk, have them pack up all the cute photos of their kids and pets and loving elderly parents... and unceremoniously rip the badge from their shirt and escort them to the front door.
Ya know what's missing in corporations today? I've become convinced... it's fear. There's no fear of failure. There's no fear of losing your job. Employees sit around noodling on Facebook, calling their significant other, looking at cat videos, and just going about their day as if the job is just some inconvenience they must endure for a few hours. What's missing is any sort of passion for putting out a rock solid product, for crushing your competitors by beating the snot out of them in every possible way, and for true leadership and vision.
Someone at PTC needs to wake up. Quit buying new companies. Quit blowing wads of cash making changes to the software interface. Quit golfing. Quit putting more money into sales and salesmen than into product development and support. Quit valuing image and flash over substance, speed, and reliability.
And for the love of all that's holy... if you're selling interoperability, ease of use, and ROI then all of your products should work together before they are released. When I click a button on the screen, the button had better work. If your sales literature touts a feature, that feature needs to function right out of the box with no excuses.
There is absolutely no excuse why the Learning Connector doesn't work with Internet Explorer 10 or 11. No excuse at all... and someone needs to be fired.