STMICROELECTRONICS

LOL! unless you've enlisted a horde of spambots, you haven't sent a "VOLUMINOUS" quantity of emails.

If you want them to pay attention, I suggest that you recruit a high-level purchasing executive at a fortune-500 manufacturing firm to press your case. If the web site gets complaints from a person who regularly places 10-million dollar orders, it might get fixed.

Mark Borgerson

I say that we have, you want to argue. What is your purpose?

That would be this group's question to you. The reason you are being ignored by them is because you are insignificant, and if the tone of your email to them resembles your postings here, they have correctly identified you as a teenager.

I have no problem with your approach, other than that I think it will have little result---as you seem to be discovering.

My purpose is to suggest other approaches that may have greater effect.

Mark Borgerson

Larwe,

You offer nothing but insults and dissention. Rather than drag the group down with your acerbic comments, why not just ignore my insignificant persona? Can you bring yourself to do that?

Also, you don't have any idea of what the groups' question to me is or even if one exists.

You read me email and I thought it was polite. However, anything that I do or say is wrong in your opinion. You should work on that.

Joe

I suggested that we find someone with purchasing clout with ST to press the case that the web site is repelling engineers who might be developing projects that could result in large quantity STM32 purchases. It's the old 6 degrees of separation approach. I don't, personally, know the sales managers at ST, but I do know a test engineer at HP. He may not purchase a lot of chips, but he has a friend who works in their laser printer design division, etc. etc.

This may seem a bit of a stretch---but the interconnections are there. For instance, back in 1977, I had a friend who showed me an interesting breadboard computer---it was an Apple 1. That changed my life in many ways. More pertinently, he was an HP engineer working on a new technology for printers. A year later, he wrote a paper: "A Compact Thermal Printer Designed for Integration into a Personal Computer (pp 22-25) by Clement C. Lo and Ronald W. Keil". That project transitioned into a printer that heated ink, instead paper. You can see the results at any Office Max or Staples store. I suspect his opinions on chip documentation could make their way up the chain to a point where someone at ST would take notice.

Mark Borgerson

Can I give you another couple of suggestions (in addition to those Mark has written about)?

First, drop the "ALL CAPS" subjects and posts. Then drop the exaggerations - the situation with ST's website is certainly not "unbelievable". Similar things have happened before, and will happen again. I suspect it is this sort of thing that Lewin thinks makes you sound like a teenager. And if the emails to ST are written in a similar manner, then they will be totally ignored. (Lewin is also highly allergic to top-posting.)

Next, there is the target of your emails. If you send an email to 21 people, you can expect that none of them will reply. Even if they think it is interesting and relevant, they will assume someone else on the list will handle it.

You want to identify a directly relevant person, such as the webmaster or someone fairly high up in marketing. Then you want to find the names of that person's immediate superior, and the superior's superior, and so on. You only want a few - three or four people at most, and you want them in a chain. The idea is to put your complaint to someone who is in a position to do something about it (such as discuss it with the right people), and make it clear that that person's boss has a copy of the email, so that he will take it seriously. You don't want to aim /too/ high - if you are making a complaint at a shop, you don't ask to see the manager unless the normal employees are refusing to help you.

I'd also agree with Mark that unless you represent a very large company, you are unlikely to make much of an impression. However, there is a better route. When I have an issue with a particular supplier, I take it up with the distributors. My company might not buy millions from ST

- but we buy millions from Arrow, EBV, Future, etc., and /they/ buy millions from ST and other companies. Part of the job of the distributors' sales folk and FAE's is to pass information, questions, complaints and praise up and down the line between their customers and their suppliers. My experience is that they are good at that job.

So rather than one person sending emails to lots of people at ST, I would suggest that anyone who finds ST's website a pain should tell their distributor. If enough people complain to the distributor, then they will take it up with ST.

That is a good approach. Another that might work is to complain to the support people at your software tool vendor. If the support people at IAR, for instance, get enough complaints, they might pass on to ST something like, "You know, we didn't mind putting your example code in our releases, but the impenetrability of your web site is generating a lot of heat for our support staff."

You know, were I in an entrepreneurial mood, I might want to take a few days to traverse all the twinkly pages at ST and capture links to all the good stuff at the leaves of the tree. I could then put together a straightforward index web site with some right-panel ads for Olimex, IAR, Raisonance, Sparkfun, etc. etc.

It might not pay much and I'm not at all sure it would get past the ST IP lawyers, but it could certainly gain me some visibility in the embedded engineering community.

Mark Borgerson

Another thing to keep in mind is that change will take time. Even though this change appeared to happen overnight you can be sure there was a lot of work behind the scenes making the change and getting ready for it.

There will be an emotional commitment to the change and a resistance to the idea that the time and money spent on it was a waste.

Also keep in mind we are a self selected group of those that prefer text over graphics when looking for information.

Robert

Deal with it - its ST. It always was like that for companies, ordering less than 10k units. Or maybe less than 100k. TI has much better support.

There is a support page on the ST webpage. Maybe file a support request: "Difficult to use webpage and unusable on non-Adobe Flash systems, like many Linux PCs, corporate PCs or iPad".