For those of you thinking about purchasing a Pinnacle product you might be interested in my personal experiences with the customer service levels recently:

Pinnacle have recently announced a new product called Pinnacle Liquid Edition 5.5. This replaces two previous products Edition 5 and Liquid Purple. The Liquid Edition 5.5 sounds like a very good product but Pinnacle have made a complete pig's ear of the release, upgrade information, and shipment of the new product. Those of us with Edition 5 have been kept in the dark (especially in Europe), the product was promised to ship on the 22nd September but all our orders show as out of stock with no date as to when they will be shipped.

All emails to Pinnacle go unanswered, all questions submitted through their eStore (the online shopping tool) get deleted (obviously they don't want prospective buyers seeing the problems), and all threads and posts in the forums detailing the problems being experienced, or referencing deleted emails and questions, are also being systematically deleted! One example was with a thread in which some posters claimed Pinnacle as being a "good company". Others quoted their experiences with regard to the poor level of customer service they are receiving regarding the upgrade saga, and the apparent censorship being employed. Oddly enough, Pinnacle deleted the bad comments, left the good comments in tact and then added their reply to the end of the thread!

So, what am I saying. Well in summary, the Pinnacle Editing software is very good, feature rich and worth the money. However, the company have no concept of, nor do they care about Customer Service.

You decide whether that should influence any buying decision. Would I buy from them again? Nope! It's Vegas and Adobe for me next time (in fact I am researching the competitive upgrade path now).

Btw, here's a game. See how long my thread called "Censorship" lasts on their forum if the link is dead, well you know what happened!

[KraGorn]

Certainly Pinnacle's support InstantCD/DVD is pathetic and failed to solve my install problem ... caused by their software registering over 1Mb of garbage into the registry.

Given their cavalier support position on InstantCopy .. don't fix 7, sell 'em the upgrade to 8 .. I'd already marked them down as a company to avoid.

[vonhosen]

I have to agree about Pinnacle support being a Pinnacle user (Impression DVD Pro)

They provide the support forums but you see very little support coming from Pinnacle reps IMO. It's all users banding togther & trying to use/share workarounds for faults/bugs that don't seem to get addressed (even though they are documented again & again.)

All I get from Pinnacle is e-mails offering me tempting upgrades (not) & informing Dazzle users that they can have these tempting offers because of their takeover.

Sonic Foundry's Vegas.......now there is excellent customer support if you want to see it. Great product line & excellent upgrade offers to existing customers.

You know something? I hear it again and again from different quarters: newsgroups, forums, even magazine reviews. You would think they [Pinnacle] would address the situation. Do they really think their products are sooo marvellous that noone will care about the customer support/service?

[KraGorn]

Sadly the word gets out slowly ... and they have many bundling deals which builds their user base ... take me, I got InstantCD/DVD version 6 bundled with a CD Writer and after experiencing problems with Nero upgraded my IC version to 7 ... seemed okay at first then had problems.

Also agree with vonhosen's comments about Sonic Foundry ... great support and customer service, a rarity in the PC software world IMX.