Comments

5 responses to “Backlash: Creative Sparks Customer Revolt When It Tries To Silence Third-Party Programmer”

1. 2008/04/01

   Stephen Usher

   Now, if this had got into the mainstream media it would be interesting. However, it hasn’t and so for the majority of the population this story never happened.

   Then again, the majority of the population don’t buy add-on sound cards.

   Reply
2. 2008/04/01

   Neil

   Good point – most computers these days don’t need add on sound cards.

   The bit I don’t follow (not be a low level driver type of person) is how this can in anyway be stealing.

   Reply
3. 2008/04/01

   Stephen Usher

   The problem was that this person took the Creative drivers, binary patched them and then started distributing them.

   Basically, he re-enabled driver functionality (such as EAX) which Creative’s management had purposefully disabled. (Which is morally wrong.) This is what they were complaining mostly about.

   I think the “theft” was in possible future purchases of sound cards so that the customers could recover functionality they had with the old hardware under XP.

   Reply
4. 2008/04/01

   Gleffs

   Yes, he enabled functionality, mostly functionality that was printed on the box over a sticker that had a “Vista ready” on it.
   He did however also enable Dolby, that wasnät licenced for those cards.
   But if CL didn’t on purpous screw up the vista drivers and dissable functionallity, would someone have bothered to find out what could be enabled?
   So even if he did a little wrong with the Dolby activation, it is severily dwarfed by the moral wrong of CL disabling functionallity and making bad drivers on purpouse under vista to make fully functional hardware obsolete.
   They obviously think they are a near monopoly at the level of microsoft in their market and has room to behave in such a manner that they by “breaking” their own cards will get people to buy their new offerings.
   Microsoft does get a lot of flames for being less then nice about making a new operating system add very little extra functionality and that this functionallity could have just as well have been released on their older OS, but have they for instance removed directX 9 from XP to make Vista look better?
   That is in essence what CL has been doing, they sell something with a feauture set, then in the next OS they disable those feautures to make the new card (essentially the same HW) look nice compared to the old “obolete” cards.
   After the abysmal support from CL and buggy/unworking bloatware people got ticked of a lot when they hear directly from the horses mouth so to speak, that this was a marketing decision, they meant for the cards to work badly under Vista.
   I think that is pretty much the issue at hand for the CL-flamefest.

   Sorry about the more then likly spelling and gramatical errors, I am not a native english-user.

   Reply
5. 2008/04/02

   Stephen Usher

   Actually, it’s not that Dolby Digital decoding wasn’t available on those cards, as under XP they had that functionality. The drivers checked for Vista and disabled the Dolby decoder. It is suspected that Creative didn’t get a license from Dolby to run under Vista.

   Reply