How Companies Extract Free Labor From Customers

Everywhere we look we see “beta” and “insider” programs where companies deputize their customers as free help to report and identify bugs in their products.

While this seems helpful from the company standpoint, there is such a thing as taking this too far. Case in point, 3DConnexion’s Space Mouse.

One of the big uses for the space mouse is 3D modeling. Fusion 360, Maya, Blender all common software used for CAD and 3D Modeling. Many people laud the space mouse, but a handful of Unity Developers have expressed an issue dating back to 2018 where the space mouse gives phantom input even when it’s not plugged in or turned on. 3D modeling and game development go hand in hand, so seeing the crossover isn’t surprising.

It’s CRAZY that this bug has existed for as long as 8 years and they have yet to properly address it.

What is surprising is this bug existing for half a decade, even with the most up-to-date version of their software. What’s more surprising, there is no easy way to quit the application and subsequent services / processes all at once.

So, as one does, I posted on Twitter warning my fellow developers about the issue just in-case they own a space mouse and are working on their own Unity projects. 3DConnexion’s Twitter account reached out to me with this:

Recruiting paying customers to work on software for your very not-cheap product just seems in poor taste.

I know I’m not the first to complain about these issues, and too often the rodeo of “it sounds like it’s not our problem, it’s probably some third-party app interfering” or “sign up for this paid support plan” or “if you sign up for beta testing you can try out our latest bugs and tell us all about them while wasting even more of your time.”

You buy something like a space mouse to save time, to streamline your workflow, not add layers of complexity. It is insulting that I need to essentially become an intern at 3DConnexion in order to get in contact with someone who has any chance of highlighting the glaring problems with the software, instead of, you know, the person talking on Twitter just copying and pasting what I said as an internal bug report.

But again, they’ve known about this “bug” since 2015. So why do they need to recruit me into their “insider program” or their stone-age bulletin board in order to report on it?

If they would have done it with my first tweet to them, and never replied, more would have been accomplished.

But it’s not surprising that this type of archaic thinking is holding this company back, since they’re using archaic bulletin board software instead of more up-to-date technologies like Discourse or one of WordPress’s many forum plugins.

But this isn’t exclusive to 3DConnexion, we see this kind of stone-age thinking across numerous companies where you pay for a product that SHOULD come as advertised, but lacks features quintessential to software from 30 years ago.

If you run into other companies like this, or had your own 3DConnexion experience, let us know on Twitter.