Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

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Hi Tim, author here.

>I believe support has reached out to you now that we understand the CPU will need to be replaced. Can you confirm this?

Yes, support reached out. I said as much in the email, but to address some of your comments publically:

(1) Totally understand this and I posess a tremendous deal of tolerance for weird problems with unusual hardware from small companies. But the support experience here was abysmal and no amount of weirdness in a problem excuses the lack of communication. I would be with you every step of the way if Raptor had communicated the progress - the first I heard that IBM was even being consulted about the issue was today - or even sent me communications at the times they promised to in earlier replies.

(3) I think you had really better fix (2) before you increase your volume. The reply I received from support today insinuates that my support experience is rare, but I can't throw a stone in the IRC channel without hitting 3-4 people who have had similarly bad support experiences. Whatever investment you're putting into your upcoming "major push", you should probably siphon off some of it for investing in better support.

It also bears mentioning that 50+ days of silence, not including an additional 30 days where communications were devoid of information outside of unfulfiled promises about future communications, followed by a detailed response on the day I publish a scathing review online, is worth note. I should hope that other customers who don't have a soapbox to complain on are also having their concerns addressed.

This was originally going to be published on the internal ticket, but since the issues were raised here I'm going to post here instead.

First, I'd like to point out that Raptor already identified one of the major problems here -- that front line support failed to keep you notified of back end progress in diagnosing the problem. Raptor Computing Systems is an OEM and ODM first and foremost, not a services and support firm -- their capacity to handle requests is limited by the amount their customers are willing to pay at time of product purchase, and internal management of RCS is trying to balance support costs with all other costs and overall product pricing. They may not always get it right, but they are trying nonetheless.

Yes, this was brought to my attention as a result of the review. That review has apparently caused sufficient damage that Raptor will now be reevaluating whether they can afford to service the individual market at this time, or whether they need to focus on business users only.

My personal take:

I am saddened to see x86 and locked computing profiting from this, but at the end of the day individuals have always been a difficult segment to target. They tend to want extremely low (below cost) pricing, high levels of service, and generally want to run various proprietary games on Windows while simultaneously settling for a false sense of security through open source firmware wrapping large hidden binary components. Out of sight, out of mind, purchase price above all other concerns seems to be the general takeaway for that market.

As a result of this mentality, individuals are not currently Raptor's core market, and at the end of the day the individual computing market will get what it is willing to pay for. If that's locked (but cheap) x86 computing, open source itself may be in serious trouble due to the impending final lockdown of those platforms. If it's instead cheap low power computing (RISC-V, low end ARM) there's an awful lot of fat that will need to be removed from near-essential projects like Qt, KDE, Gnome, Firefox, Chromium, GCC, Clang, etc. to better fit them on the lower end platforms. I have not seen any developers yet willing to put in the time and effort to re-architect those systems for low end computing resources; in many cases the fundamental design would need to be changed (i.e. remove interpreted scripts as much as possible, go back to C/C++ or a similar low level language, etc.). In the case of projects like Chromium, it may simply not happen as the intent of that particular project is partly to serve ads and DRM protected content through a portal system, which aligns nicely with the idea of locked end user computing on x86.

This reads like blame shifting, not accountability.

> Yes, this was brought to my attention as a result of the review. That review has apparently caused sufficient damage that Raptor will now be reevaluating whether we can afford to service the individual market at this time, or whether they need to focus on business users only.

See: the review caused the damage, not Raptor's failure to provide a good support experience. In any case, if you can't handle the support load, then you're probably right in reconsidering.

I am really rooting for Raptor here, I'm not your enemy. I agree that x86 monoculture is awful for the ecosystem and ARM hardly presents anything better. This is also why I got heavily involved in RISC-V, and I wanted to find something similar in POWER9. I haven't laid hands on a working Blackbird yet but if it is as good as I hope it is, then I think you have a good shot if you just focus on scaling and fixing your support problems. If you can solve the support and get the system working, I would be thrilled to amend my review and publish a new one with all of the things I like about my shiny new Blackbird system.

> I am saddened to see x86 and locked computing profiting from this, but at the end of the day individuals have always been a difficult segment to target. They tend to want extremely low (below cost) pricing, high levels of service, and generally want to run various proprietary games on Windows while simultaneously settling for a false sense of security through open source firmware wrapping large hidden binary components. Out of sight, out of mind, purchase price above all other concerns seems to be the general takeaway for that market.

I can't claim to know what the firehose of support tickets is like, but know that there are users who don't fit this strawman. I'm one of them. I'm not here to run proprietary games on Windows. My stated goal is to promote the development of portable software and the adoption of freer systems by using my board to introduce POWER9 support to builds.sr.ht, giving access to POWER9 cycles to tens of thousands of developers. It's causes like this which help address the problems you mention of fat software needing to be improved to make alternative architectures viable. No small part of why Chromium is slow on ppc and fast on x86 is because there's a JIT for x86 and not for ppc, not necessarily because of fundamental problems in Chromium's design.

But yeah, there are fundamental problems in our entire ecosystem with respect to disreagarding performance thanks to the luxuries afforded to us by fast x86 systems. Is the answer to this that we should be writing off alternative hardware models? No, the hardware should strive to be fast and the software should strive to meet it. Both parties have a responsibility to performance and we can't lay the blame at each other's feet and ignore our role in it. It's a slow process to change the industry, we must exercise patience.

EDIT: it's been pointed out to me that Chromium has a JIT on POWER9. This doesn't substantially change my response.

> This reads like blame shifting, not accountability.

I don't think I was clear enough here, sorry. Yes, Raptor Computing Systems is accountable for its poor support experience. Their management is trying, unsuccessfully, to manage the support load. I am actually on the engineering and technology side moreso than the support and business side, and I have no direct ability to change how support is handled beyond making (strong) recommendations.

Fundamentally, however, the blame does lie primarily with consumers that are unwilling to pay for owner controlled computing. Raptor took a risk with the Blackbird, attempting to broaden the reach of owner controlled compute beyond business and high end workstation users, and fundamentally underestimated > 20x additional support load that new market would end up causing. Raptor does not have the resources to handle that kind of support load, and the increases in product pricing required to do so would put Blackbird back out of reach of everyone except business users.

Raptor was working on fixing these issues regardless, but AMD Rome has made that nearly impossible due to the (predictable, but unfortunate) customer reaction that I detailed earlier. We have had to pivot to a different mechanism to try to resolve the problems, and I am not allowed to say more publicly as to what that will be at this time, other than it is coming for October.

Thank you for clarifying more.

Not sure if you're following IRC, but just in case I'll mention it here as well: Raptor products are already outpricing most consumers. Even in casual conversations with hacker friends, most of them balk at the price. Point being: if you increased your prices most of your buyers wouldn't blink. At present your buyers are blinking at the poor support experience. I would have paid a 50% premium for a product with actual support.

A compromise would be to offer ala-carte support packages, perhaps billed yearly. I would also have paid for that.

I know these decisions aren't in your court, but I don't have anyone else to share my opinion with, so there you have it. I hope that I will publish a more positive review of Raptor with these problems addressed soon. Thanks for coming by the thread to share your thoughts.

A number of users on IRC also said they would be priced out by any 50% premium increase...

(1) I would have paid 50% more but I also imagine that 50% is hardly necessary to fund a proper support system. That represents an increase of nearly a thousand dollars per unit.

(2) Having known the person (singular)* who said they'd be priced out at +50% from other interactions, I wouldn't take their comments at face value.

* Apparently it's two people.

What you're saying is disingenuous at best and gaslighting at worst. Just because you apparently have a very generous budget to throw at a problem doesn't mean everyone else in the same space does. I really struggle to see what the point is in making such a comment about other people's financial situations, and I would hope you can either justify making such an inflammatory remark or walk it back.

The specific person I'm referring to has lost any goodwill from other interactions I've had with them. I don't trust their statements.

And like I said, I would have personally paid a 50% increase, or for an ala-carte support package, but I doubt a 50% bump is actually necessary. One which doesn't push the board out of people's price ranges is probably feasible. Remember that we're talking about $2-3K, for the cheapest option with the simplest loadout. Customers already have disposable income. These are not priced like consumer hardware.

I beg you to reconsider the repercussions of holding grudges, especially in the FOSS community. All too often I see this pattern where people take a few disagreements too personally and hold them against each other for eternity. I know who you're talking about specifically (I was on the IRC channel at the time) and I know that they are genuinely trying to make it up to you (full retractions, refraining from speaking ill of the sort in the future, attempting to adjust their behavior so that they are not so quick to jump to so-called "hot takes" or other aggressive behavior). I hope that you, in turn, could also, in your own time, learn to forgive and let go as well. Please, for the sake of good FOSS everywhere - I know the two of you could accomplish so much!

Hello,

I am an enthusiastic customer, and in case you missed my comments to you elsewhere, if you do shift sales in another direction, please consider continuing to sell to the hardcore old customers willing to do their own work on this hardware whatever it takes. This project is too crucial to let randos with just a light PR attack choke off the supply of this kind of hardware to people to whom it is so utterly critical.

-mm

Since we seem to have reached HN's reply nesting limit, posting here...

Good to know on the paid support side. This is something we've been considering for a while, and is probably coming as part of the mitigation strategy next month.

Tip: click the timestamp to reply to any comment without regard to the nesting limit or flamewar protection. Don't tell dang about this, it's probably a bug.

I'm glad that things are moving foward in a productive way. I hope to be an early customer of paid support.

Just to close the loop here, we've pushed up the timetable for implementation of some of the support-related improvements (several are live now) and are giving the individual market another try. Our status dashboard is showing no unanswered tickets at this time, so we should be starting from a clean slate of sorts at this point.

To anyone having support issues, please feel free to re-raise any issues that were not addressed to your satisfaction earlier this year (including ones that may have been auto-closed)! Management is watching closely at this time to observe the process and make sure things work well for Raptor's end users.

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