How Telerik won a blogger's heart - attention and openness
If you develop 3rd party controls for .NET Development, you should be taking notes Telerik's attention to customers - here's the full story. Chris complained about his overall problems with 3rd party controls, and Telerik's in particular (less than perfect docs, too many features that need to be turned off, too much HTML output in one of their ASP.NET controls etc..).
A while later, he got a direct email from Telerik's CEO letting him know he read his blog fully, and explaining how they are planning to overcome all the stuff he has listed on his blog (some already fixed).
It was direct and open -and it won Chris's heart again, even if he never went back and checked up on Telerik to see if they did good on their promises. They have a loyal customer who was willing to continue to use their products, recommend them heartily to other potential customers (through his blog) and give an overall sense of openness to the community. That's priceless if you're in the 3rd party business - and everyone should be learning from this.
This is how business should be done in the world where the Internet is king. Just imagine what happens when the opposite occurs - no support, not emails, or worse - a BAD email from one of the tech people: that kind of bad publicity is very hard to remove once its out there. There are many stories you might have heard detailing such acts. but how many have you heard that were as good as the one I just talked about? how much trust do you have in companies you hear something as good about them?