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Re: Gibson and Oberheim



At 1:17 PM -0800 1/3/99, Howard Harawitz wrote:

>I was not trying to add to some kind of conspiracy against 
>Gibson/Oberheim.
>My intent was to offer constructive criticism via this list, believing 
>that
>the folks from Gibson who monitor it would carry the word upstairs.

In other words, instead of simply calling them with a helpful suggestion,
you choose to make a public spectacle, cause largely undeserved fear and
doubt among other potential customers, and force them to devote a lot of
people and effort to repairing the resulting PR damage when they could have
been fixing the small problem you had and getting on with their job of
producing music gear? I'm not trying to flame you in particular, Howard,
because I've seen many other people go way more over the top than you have,
but I just don't see the logic in this approach. It seems more designed to
harm than help, and I'm getting a bit tired of seeing people wasting a lot
of time and effort on all sides to deal with this sort of thing. In my
experience, this is about the least effective way to deal with a problem.



>>But we're not hearing reports of that, we're hearing rumors of that. When
>>pressed, we discover that the rumored info is based on shaky inferences,
>>unsubstantiated info from some other unverified source, or based on
>>something that happened two years ago rather than any current situation.
>
>I am definitely not "screaming unfounded rumors" based on two year old
>information.

you might not have, but others definitely were.

>Only a couple of months ago, I, myself, had problems finding a
>shop in the US or Canada that would sell me an Oberheim Echoplex. I
>reported that experience to this list. At the time, that seemed
>appropriate. In fact, it was only after several of those kinds of reports
>appeared, and via the list's "Group Buy", that I (along with several dozen
>other list members) was actually able to acquire an Echoplex.

The people who organized that group buy didn't have trouble finding a
dealer, right? In fact, there were a variety of dealers competing for that,
as I recall. Other people have located dealers without much difficulty,
right? If you call up Gibson and ask for a dealer, they are happy to
suggest a few. Probably they can even tell you which ones have stock in
echoplexes or whatever you're looking for, or when another shipment is
expected. You can even get dealer information off their website. When
people ask for a recommendation for echoplex dealers on this list, they
promptly get a variety of replies, often including replies from Gibson
folks. In other words, was this really Gibson's fault?

As far as I can tell, Gibson is more than happy to help you buy their
products, and generally friendly and efficient about it. The same can be
said for just about any other company, I would guess. So before you go
citing this as evidence of horrible calamities for the echoplex, could you
at least ask yourself whether you were making a sensible effort to find a
dealer in the first place? For example, did you try the obvious approach of
calling Gibson and asking for a dealer near you?


>If there are misconceptions and rumors about Gibson's ability to deliver
>Oberheim products, they are being spread by some reasonably reputable 
>music
>dealers. Those are the people that you and Gibson need to reassure -- not
>the folks like me that are trying to buy Oberheim products from those 
>dealers.

Sorry, I haven't seen any of these rumors about Gibson being spread by
"reputable dealers". More like irresponsible net users. If a Gibson dealer
were doing that, I imagine they would cease to be a dealer pretty quickly.
I have seen a few cases where uninformed dealers were telling potential
customers things about Oberheim that were wrong, and as soon as Gibson knew
about it I think they tried to correct the problem (or other dealers
happily jumped in to take the business). For the most part, the damaging
rumors I've seen were coming from uninformed people throwing fits on the
net. The sad thing is this stuff persists regardless of what a company has
done. There's always somebody popping up to scream about something online
without making any effort at all to to see if what they are saying reflects
any real situation. It really sucks for the people on the other side of it,
who are working hard to do things right and still get stuck wasting their
time on pointless PR firedrills.

It's not just Gibson, either, this sort of thing happens a lot. But in the
past few months there have been all sorts of crazy things said about
Gibson, very little of which had any reality associated with it.

I think it's an issue of responsibility for the community you are in. For
one, if there are hardly any companies interested in producing looping
gear, how are you helping that situation by using public forums to attack
those that do and scaring away their potential customers? Would you rather
there were no companies producing these instruments? If you want a better
situation, how about making a positive contribution rather than a negative
one?

The second responsibility issue is libel. The result of people making
unfounded accusations online is more and more companies are filing libel
suits to recover damages to their reputations or their business. I imagine
the outcome of this trend will be a chill on people's willingness to
express themselves in any circumstance, which sucks. I think if we, as a
community, don't want that sort of thing happening, we all need to take
some responsibility for the accuracy and effect of our words.


>My perception is that of a prospective customer, and I was reporting this
>because, from that point of view, Gibson has a bit of fence mending to do.

What more do you expect them to do? They've posted here regularly, they've
repeatedly provided all of the information that you failed to find in this
very forum, they've been very helpful to folks on the phone, they've done
backflips to help people out who reported a problem to them, they've worked
very hard to get production up to meet demand and improve their products,
they've done everything they could to improve relations with dealers. Does
none of that count? Should they also be employing a bank of people to post
careful replies every time some tortured ego with an email account decides
to trash them anyway? Personally, I would much rather see them (and other
companies, like mine) doing their job of producing musical instruments than
wasting time endlessly combatting the latest items in the rumor mill.


>IMO, that means taking care of small things like an Email address that
>fails. Because if they don't, folks like me will be led to believe that 
>the
>recent changes, rather than solving old problems, may have created some 
>new
>ones that will continue to get in the way of satisfactory service.

But you didn't even give them a chance to take care of this problem! Rather
than contacting them to let them know of the error, you jumped right onto
the net to make an issue of it. How fair was that?

>From my perspective, no matter what they do there will be some people who
manage to find some problem, no matter how trivial, that proves the end is
nigh. Personally, I find that irresponsible and frustrating, especially
when you don't even give them a chance to deal with the situation.

As far as I can tell, the  Oberheim/Electar/Gibson guys (and any company
really) have been happy to get feedback from people and fix any problems
they could. Give them a chance at least!

kim


______________________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                   | Looper's Delight
kflint@annihilist.com       | http://www.annihilist.com/loop/loop.html
http://www.annihilist.com/  | Loopers-Delight-request@annihilist.com