I get a big kick out of watching the show How It’s Made. I enjoy learning about the physical engineering concepts used in creating many of the things we take for granted in our lives. Contact lenses. Aluminum foil. Pencils.

The other thing I get enthralled in is the mind-boggling use of specialized equipment for creating these objects. I don’t know if I ever really thought about how a big bakery made bread, but I’m sure I thought that I’d see something that resembled an oven in the process somewhere. And maybe a guy with a spatula on a pole, like at the pizza parlor. A real bakery looks nothing like that. It’s all custom-built equipment that is designed for nothing but mixing, balling, raising, cooking, cooling, cutting, and bagging bread. Very few human hands are involved, and somebody has clearly been thinking about ways to make it faster and cheaper for quite a long time.

So, why is it that we approach our development and IT tasks as if each one is a heirloom chest of drawers that needs to be chiseled out from the hewn oak with our bare, expert hands?

I have gotten in the habit of writing scathing reviews of LogMeIn Ignition. It’s been a little while, and I missed a version, so I thought I’d spend a little time raking them over the coals again. What I discovered surprised me. I can no longer reproduce the problems I was seeing in the last couple of versions. Maybe they fixed it! Or possibly upgrading to an iPhone 4s is how you avoid the bugs.

After my last review (and a tweet mentioning it) I got a flurry of response from LogMeIn support and customer relations. Unfortunately, after a few conversations, and providing detailed notes as well as client logs of the failures, I fell off their radar again. I am going to raise my App Store rating a star, since I can’t find the bugs for now….but I’m still terribly disappointed by the responsiveness of their support team.

• Talking to their help desk is like arguing with pigeons. Each new one wants to start the conversation over. Usually with a form-letter FAQ.
• Talking on their forums is simply a waste of keyboard life. They rarely even come and read or respond in their forums. Let alone fix things that are mentioned there.

I really want to see LogMeIn be the best product on the market. They have the programmers and technology to do it. It just looks like those people are surrounded by people who don’t care about the product or customers.

I see a number of quality reviews in the App Store that echo these sentiments.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:

LogMeIn is the best…But their support is very poor. And this version of the app is buggy as hell.

I have spent literally thousands of dollars on LogMeIn services. They have the best remote control platform in the world. That said, I’m a small customer for them, and it is very clear that their support for small customers is in the “ignore them until they go away” category.

I wish things were different.