Net-Mares: Letters from Cyberhell

While acknowledging that Polaris committed serious oversights in PackRat's development, CEO Leach believes that the CompuServe flames were fueled by a small vehemently anti-Polaris group -- maybe 20 to 30 people.

It's impossible to confirm that number because CompuServe, like most BBSs, permanently erases messages every few days. The number seems low, given the thousands of messages that were posted over several weeks. Ex-PackRat user David Hale, a computer-imaging specialist based in Washington, D.C., and a participant (though not a flamer) in the Polaris exchange, thinks Leach's estimate is not unreasonable.

One thing is clear: the competition will be watching -- and perhaps participating. Without question most, if not all, of the other PIM companies monitored Polaris's CompuServe forum before, during, and after its troubled period: monitoring the competition is a common and accepted practice on-line. Leach suspects that at least one of his competitors publicly attacked Polaris on CompuServe.

One of the most distressing aspects of Polaris's ordeal was the presence in its own forum of numerous conversations that not only derided PackRat but extolled the virtues of competing products. If employees of a rival company promote their product in your forum, that's poaching, according to CompuServe representative Debra Young. If ordinary citizens promote that product, however, it's not considered poaching. But Leach points out that given the ease of assuming identities on-line, poachers can pretend to be nonpoachers and do equivalent damage.

Finally, the press will be watching. The press is probably what did Polaris the most harm, according to David Coursey, a software-industry analyst. "The real damage was done not by people who were actually there on CompuServe but by the disseminators -- people who never saw the messages themselves but became convinced that Polaris was in trouble."

Being on-line on CompuServe didn't cause Polaris's problems, but it did exacerbate them. "The problem was entirely one of a failed quality process," says Coursey. Still, the question remains: If you open yourself up to customers on-line, are you setting yourself up to get reamed publicly before you even have a chance to correct a problem?

For his part, Coursey, as well as others in the industry, are sympathetic toward Polaris, given that many companies face similar pressures to produce increasingly complex programs in a volatile marketplace. However, Polaris's customers (or ex-customers, in many cases) tend to be considerably less forgiving. Many of those people lost time and money trying to get PackRat to work, felt their requests for assistance were stonewalled, and had to recover crucial data about professional contacts and appointments after disk crashes. Given what they saw played out on-line, many customers felt that Polaris never tried to understand or acknowledge the scope of the trouble it had caused. After all, with the whole Internet population at its fingertips, the company had the chance to respond publicly with both speed and graciousness. Says Alan Mark, a psychology professor and ex-PackRat user from Mount Berry, Ga., "The company consistently avoided taking responsibility. . . . Its attitude on CompuServe ranged from mildly apologetic to belligerent."

Customers also faulted Leach for not confronting the situation on-line much sooner than he did. "Leach took his sweet time responding to a huge customer backlash," says Carl C. Norman, a software producer from Sunnyvale, Calif. He adds, "I'll never buy a Polaris product again, and I go out of my way to influence my friends and associates to avoid Polaris products."

Only after weeks of complaints and unrest did Leach post a note on CompuServe acknowledging and apologizing for PackRat's problems. Leach maintains that he sent the note as soon as the company understood what was going on with the software and was sure that the problem was its own.

Another factor that may have contributed more to customer ire than the buggy software itself was Polaris's payment policies, which had been a major source of on-line complaints. Polaris not only charged customers' credit cards for upgrades more than two months before the upgrades were shipped but also charged customers for shipping and handling if they wanted updated disk sets that contained the finalized nonbuggy software.

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