Now You pay for Drivers - UMAX pioneers new price gouge

[Undertaker]

Ena endiaferon arthro elpizo na min akolouthisoun kai ales eteries autin tin logiki.

 

Now You pay for Drivers - UMAX pioneers new price gouge

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco

Posted: 03/06/2002 at 07:13 GMT

 

A week ago scanner giant UMAX began to charge its customers for driver updates that were previously free as a web download.

 

PC users expecting to get XP drivers, and Macintosh users expecting to get upgrades to Mac OS X had a shock in store. Device drivers that were previously available as a free download had been withdrawn, and users were now invited to pay for a CD-ROM version.

 

And this amounts to a tidy sum. In some cases, the CD package on offer tops $60. The humblest driver update for MacOS 9 is now $32. Plus shipping. Plus your state's sales tax.

 

Windows XP comes with support for popular UMAX scanner out of the box - but the software doesn't match the fidelity of exiting, in-house UMAX drivers - leaving loyal UMAX customers with the choice of losing functionality or paying for a CD they didn't want.

 

Even by the standards of today's accelerated capitalism -where everything's outsourced or contracted out - that's quite an innovation in customer relations, we mused. But when we tried to contact UMAX corporate headquarters on Friday, things got really weird. Check this out -

 

UMAX is based in Dallas, but it's excluded itself from all of the local business directories. It's ex-directory. Dont look there.

 

UMAX has a media contacts page , which was last updated in November 2000. We rang the PR company listed, and they confirmed that they'd parted company eighteen months ago.

 

We rang the contact listed as UMAX's whois entry - a telephone number in Oakland, CA. - but there was no reply.

 

UMAX itself was getting more elusive by the second.

 

That left the outsourced UMAX "technical support department" - and remember, none of these folks are UMAX employees, as is the contemporary globalised fashion - but we got some interesting responses. Four calls of our six calls were blanked because we refused to offer name and address details. No one in the technical support was prepared to forward us to UMAX's corporate HQ. Posing as first-time buyers, one support rep explained to us that the policy had changed because "most of our users are on dial-up Internet" and since the drivers themselves were quite big, this was the most cost-efficient way of distributing the code, honestly.

 

It's hard to imagine a commercial organization as secretive and as elusive as UMAX. And we've been round the block a few times. It's virtualized itself to an extraordinary degree - it doesn't actually make anything, and it outsources everything from manufacturing to distribution to customer support to third parties. So for all intents and purposes, it may as well be a front for 'al-Qaeda. Who knows?

[astrolabos]

Όντως το παράδειγμα το έχουν ακολουθήσει και άλλοι δυστυχώς...

Ένας φίλος μου αγόρασε πρόσφατα (12/2001) μια επώνυμη κάρτα ήχου και πήγε να την εγκαταστήσει στο σύστημα του, που για κακή του τύχη, είχε εγκατεστημένα τα xp. Όλα του δούλεψαν μία χαρά. Το μόνο πρόβλημα που είχε ήταν οτι το emote control που είχε δεν το "έβλεπαν" τα xp. Πήγε λοιπόν στο μεγάλο και επώνυμο μαγαζί που αγόρασε την κάρτα, και ο πωλητής του λέει οτι "για να πάρετε τους οδηγούς για τα xp, πρέπει να παραγγείλετε το cd" και φυσικά δεν εννούσε τζάμπα... Αυτά. Πώς σας φάνηκε?

[kavaliotis]

Gia na mhn leme oti 8eloume, des ti lene sto www.warp2search.net gia na ma8eis..

 

"Sorry, but this Statement is absolutely wrong. The reason why the drivers are not offered is, because UMAX in United States have outsourced their support and for them it's too expensive to run their own fileserver.(UMAX Taiwan did the development, but global UMAX Companies are independent from Taiwan, they have to pay their own bills) Nearly all drivers are still available on UMAX Taiwan FTP-Server ftp.umax.com.tw , some of the latest drivers are not offered as update Versions, because they are only available as complete CD."

[pyro]

e more, sthn kathgoreia "warez" 0a mpenoune kai oi drivers... <img border="0" title="" alt="[Roll Eyes]" src="images/icons/rolleyes.gif" />

[Undertaker]

Auti einai kai i episimi apandisi

 

UMAX US offers price cut for free drivers

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco

Posted: 04/06/2002 at 02:20 GMT

 

We tracked down Wenn Lin, who describes himself as UMAX's US General Manager, to ask about the company's new policy of charging its US customers for drivers.

 

As many of you have pointed out, the same drivers are available on UMAX sites worldwide: but if you're in the US or Canada, or South America, you're invited to pay for a CD.

 

Even in countries where UMAX has only a distributor, which is most countries, customers are better served than in the Americas. For example, Israeli distributor Chayon provides links to drivers hosted on UK and German sites, with no fee or registration required. While UMAX in the UK even offers a beta Mac OS X driver, there isn't even mention of such a driver on the US site.

 

Either Mr Lin's English isn't perfect, or it was a very bad line indeed - although I could hear him perfectly - for it was several minutes before I could establish that I was a journalist. (The word "newspaper" finally seemed to do the trick).

 

Mr Lin says the company is "too small" to have anyone working on public relations. He declined to say how many people UMAX employs directly in the United States, although he said it was more than "five or ten".

 

(UMAX has closed its Union City and Fremont offices in California)

 

The oversees UMAX businesses are independently operated, he said. And unlike the US operation, they're hardly elusive - all the websites and international distributors are listed with telephone numbers.

 

We asked why UMAX was charging US customers for the drivers, when they're available as a free download. He didn't know they were freely available. He disagreed that this made charging for CDs pointless.

 

Mr Lin repeated the technical support explanation that drivers are too large for modem users to download:-

 

"This is not a driver, this is a program," he said. "As a program it's 30MB it's quite big - if we put it on an ftp site it takes too long download. So that's why we decided to change it. Our driver is part of our entire program so we don't distinguish driver and program."

 

But UMAX has provided US customers with stripped down drivers, you tell us.

 

His explanation of why the drivers are so expensive was interesting, too:

 

At first Mr Lin explained that the cost was mostly packaging and shipping costs. He told us he wants to cut the price UMAX currently charges for the CD. When we pointed out that we could press and ship a CD in the United States for a lot less than the $47 MacOS users are charged, he had another explanation:-

 

"We have a lot of software bundles. We have to pay a royalty. Bundles like Adobe," he said. I pointed out that many users simply want a small driver, but he repeated his point that UMAX doesn't separate the driver from the program.

"We want to reduce our SKUs," he said. What's a SKU [stock-keeping unit], we asked?

 

"I'm not sure it stands for but it's how many items are in the warehouse," he said.

 

We pointed out that UMAX could reduce its SKUs to zero if it posted the links to the drivers for its American customers, but he argued that some people prefer to have a CD, especially those modem users. Which is true, some do, but that's no reason to take the free download off the web.

 

Did he know that UMAX's contracted-out call centre staff were told to not to give out the corporate HQ's telephone number? No, he didn't, and that needed to change. Did he know that the corporate HQ wasn't on the UMAX US web site?

 

"I didn't know that, I'll look into it. I appreciate it."

 

As Ron Carlson at Insanely Great Mac, which picked up on this first, points out, "The cheapness exhibited by Umax's US operations will be paid for out of the pockets of the company's other operations. This is an untenable situation both for customers and the company." ?