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But you did ignore Prof Pixel's advice.
I appreciate that you take your support duties seriously. My contention is that you are going about them the wrong way.
The problem is that you are expecting users to encounter a known issue and deal with it, when you should be helping them to avoid it in the first place. In my case, the results of this policy were nearly catastrophic. (My wife was just barely able to deliver her product in time; had she failed to make her deadlines, the damage to our business would easily have been more than one hundred times the cost of a SuperDuper license.) I could have spared myself this grief by not downloading the latest version of SuperDuper, but you chose not to provide the information I needed to make this decision.
So. You know there's an issue that may affect some users of SuperDuper on Intel machines running OS X 10.4. You also know that these users can avoid this issue by simply downloading and using a previous version of SuperDuper. Why not simply add a warning to the download page stating that users with this particular combination of hardware and OS should use the previous version?
Such a warning would take 10 to 15 minutes, tops, to add to your website. If it saves even one user (let alone your small minority) just one hour of grief, then it will have been worthwhile. The fact that most users would not bother to read the information does not justify your failure to make it available to the few who would.
I would ask you to consider the adage, "The customer is always right." Yes, it is clearly nonsense in many cases. I doubt that most users of SuperDuper know more than you folks do about programming backup utilities for the Macintosh, so you would be quite justified in ignoring any ill-considered advice from Joe Average-user regarding which APIs you should be using, etc.
But when it comes to knowing what information one needs to make a valid decision regarding whether one should download or purchase a piece of software, please understand that your customers will almost always have a better idea of their needs than you. Again, most users may well choose to ignore this information; but that does not lessen its value to the few who really need it.
So when a customer takes the time to write in and tell you what you could have done to spare him a couple hours' grief, as Prof Pixel did, your best course of action is to apologize and repair the deficiency as quickly as possible. Had you done as he requested, then there's a good chance I would be much more impressed with SuperDuper and more likely to buy Shirt Pocket products than I am at present.
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