re: the state of QCharts support and reliability -- from the DayTrading Expo
I'm very glad to hear that Quote.com plans to start supporting QCharts again. Over the past months, I've not been able to reach support by phone, or get responses to emails - either to the support email, or individuals at Quote.com. Very frustrating, it's a great product but I feel a bit hung out to dry by the folks over on Shoreline.
I've used Quote.com services on and off for years, and this is very characteristic of this company: poorly-mananged customer support. I still get emails from them on 4-year-old portfolio alerts, that I've asked them to stop mailing me a number of times, by email, phone, and letters. They just ignore them -- typical. So, maybe the new management will come in and improve things, turning it into a more responsive company. It is really a very cosmic joke (on their customers) that Quote.com managed to arrange to receive that award recently for "great customer service"! Ha - someone should be struck by lightning for that one.
So, here at the daytrading expo in Ontario (yesterday), I buttonholed several of the Quote.com people (who shall respectfully remain anonymous ;) that are demonstrating QCharts to the masses, and inquired what's the deal. Specifically, I asked them what is their motivation to maintain the product and improve the service, now that they've sold out and are counting their stock options. For what it's worth, they assured me (I believe with great sincerity) that the Quote.com employees and management still have an earnest interest in improving support of the product (despite the incredibly poor service over the past months, which they did not deny).
They reason their servers reliability has decayed is, they had one guy -- a technical founder I guess -- maintaining them; a team of newer employees has taken over running them, and they are just establishing their baseline competency.
The overall picture that was painted is that things are going to improve, remaining a semi-independent subsidiary of the acquiring company. The CEO of Lycos is reportedly a QCharts user and wants to see it improve, which is a good sign.
FYI, maybe there is hope. I would like to see them improve, it's such a great product but who can live with zero support and flaky servers, for a key trading tool?
-Steve |
