That particular horror story led me to not equip our development team with a dozen POWER9 machines, which is a pity, because the combination of almost-total trustworthiness and enormous firepower was extremely attractive for our particular niche (plus, I used to hand-code PPC64 AltiVec “velocity engine” code for HFT funds back when Apple sold G5 Xserves).

I’m glad to hear that it was a one-off and that you have revised your support strategy, but... really, it made for a pretty frustrating read. It’s not chump change, and going out on that kind of a limb on... trust... which was clearly unwarranted at least at the time of that initial incident.

There’s nothing more frustrating than paying top dollar for something exotic and then being stonewalled by oblivious “tech support” when things don’t work as advertised, particularly when something is sufficiently novel or unusual that relatively few other users are out there to proffer help and the potential points of failure are plentiful and “unknown unknowns”.

As far as I’m concerned, that incident was extremely bad publicity. That board could’ve been shipped to me. I’d have been left to dangle from my solitary rope and squirm when management asked me what was going on.

That’s just not acceptable, sadly.

I totally feel your pain. You do so much work to keep things super structured and still bizarre defects escape or only show in the wild.

In fact I'm debugging a device in the wild behaving very strangely at this exact moment.

> the larger failure in my mind was the breakdown in the support process.

100% agreed. This is where your company failed. And now has redeemed itself.