The forum thread titles say it all: a full-scale customer revolt among buyers of Creative Labs’ sound cards, complete with boycott demands, online petitions and wild threats of class-action lawsuits.
It’s the denouement of a short, fiery saga. The alleged villain of the piece is Creative, which advertises its add-in PC sound cards as Vista compatible, despite offering only limited functionality under that platform in its Vista drivers. Our hero is fan developer Daniel_K, who fixed Creative’s gimped software and made the modified package available to other users.
In doing so, he attracted the attention of Creative’s vice president of corporate communications, Phil O’Shaughnessy, who posted a warning to its official forums on Friday. In the letter, addressed to Daniel_K directly, he accused him of stealing and told him to cease distribution of the upgraded software.
"The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing," O’Shaughnessy wrote. "By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods."
All hell broke loose, but not before the very first response calmly summed up the collective thoughts of dozens of fans.
"My God, you guys got some balls on you," wrote a poster nicknamed TrooperTom. "Either that, or you’re all borderline mad".
Creative’s customers complain frequently about instability and a poor feature set under Vista. After having links to Daniel_K’s work removed and accusing him of infringing its intellectual property, Creative’s agents received from him an agreement not to post them elsewhere. But it was too late: the fixed driver packages are readily available from BitTorrent sites.
Daniel_K’s status among Creative fans led some to demand that Creative hire him and make his work official.
Creative Labs did not respond to requests for comment, but in his message, O’Shaughnessy suggested that Creative Labs deliberately tailored its Vista drivers to be less capable than those released for Windows XP:
"If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make," wrote O’Shaughnessy.
Despite the company’s position, links to third-party drivers remain intact in its Windows Vista subforum.
Creative’s forum administrators have also posted detailed clarifications of its Vista drivers’ functionality, identifying some of the Vista issues as bugs which it plans to fix. The official drivers for Vista are themselves recently updated.
Times are bad for Creative. It fortunes have slid since the 1990s, when it surmounted rival sound card maker AdLib and came to dominate the sound card market. In recent years, however, an early lead in the digital music player market flagged under sustained assault from Apple and its now-dominant iPods, just as motherboard-integrated audio chips improved to the point where expensive add-in cards began to slip from the mainstream.
Its profits in 2007 were the result of a payment from Apple, and it recently sold its headquarters to an undisclosed buyer for $250 million, from which it will lease the premises.
