Coilcraft disconintues use of Remote Approach (Was : Document tracking in PDF)

Coilcraft have always seemed like a decent bunch to me. Did you ever get clarification on the reason for their use of that feature?

If the purpose is to check to see if an updated data sheet or errata page is available at the time you open the document, I'm not going to complain too loudly over that. Some digital devices have data sheets hundreds of pages long that are frequently revised and corrected, and you DON'T want to work from an obsolete copy. Not likely to be the case with SMT inductors, I guess, but still... where's the harm?

-- jm

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John told me this:

complain too loudly over that. Some digital devices have data sheets

Hello all,

I'm John Stellberg, Marketing Communications Manager at Coilcraft. Pete and I have been communicating regarding this issue and I explained that we had experimented with Remote Approach in an effort to prevent data on 3 or 4 of our very newest products out of the hands of competitors. Coilcraft isn't fond of being the R&D department for countless Asian coilwinders.

I pulled the plug on our use of Remote Approach because of the security concerns it raised with our customers and the realization that, even if I did find that data had been routed to a competitor, the horse was already out of the barn at that point.

There are perhaps 20 - 30 copies of tagged documents out there, and on Monday we will be notifying recipients and sending replacement copies without the Remote Approach code.

To anyone who has been inconvenienced or offended by this, I apologize.

Regards,

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John Stellberg Director of Marketing Communications COILCRAFT

1102 Silver Lake Road Cary IL 60013

Luhan,

Jack is still around; he's 120 now. 8^)

He usually stops in during the Christmas holidays and I'll be sure to pass along your message.

Regards,

John Stellberg Coilcraft

Coilcraft rang a bell - my first job just out of high school in Cary Illinois! I was hired as an engineering assistant by J. Renskers (who looked to be about 100 years old to me at the time). My rate of pay was $1.35/hr - I now make approximately 100 times that much.

Luhan

In my experience, yes. The cost of good quality is significantly lower than tech support, warranty returns/refunds and product recall.

It may also be the wrong attack on the problem anyway. If they copy you, they won't develop their own R&D which could be a real threat to you. I don't think they match you on quality control. In my market, one bogus part could easily cost me more than I could ever hope to save.

I suspect that others in this group would agree that even in lower cost markets, zero defects is worth extra.

As stated in the original thread, thank you John, we appreciate your candor, courtesy and graciousness in quickly solving the problem.

We recommend you to your boss. :>)

And, John Stellberg dealt with this and responded on a Saturday, working beyond the call of duty on the weekend, just to put out a small smoldering s.e.d. fire!

Not to mention testing, rework and retesting...

Ditto.

I remember getting caught up in the Pentium bug mess, and the response time of the vendors was measured in weeks, not hours. Very impressive, and it confirms my impression of Coilcraft as a first-tier company.

I don't suppose you want to tell us how you folks can possibly manufacture a wirewound 0201 inductor?!

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

He is certainly to be commended for his response. I'm not sure I'd call the discussion smouldering, a brushfire maybe :)

Now if they would get rid of that silly and pointless e-mail requirement.

Robert

Also, I doubt the phone-home feature would work with ghostview, which is what I normally use to read PDF's at home.

--Mac

This is why I keep TCP/IP turned off except when I actually want to connect to the internet. If that is not feasible, then go to your hosts file and add the offending URL to it thusly:

ad.doubleclick.net A 127.0.0.1

This, for example, kills all attempts access that URL.

Al