Bad Experience with Knightlite Software

[MedOfficer]

I just had a most disturbing encounter with someone calling himself "James" (wouldn't give last name but claimed to be the owner) at Knitelite Software. One of my students downloaded the "Internet Version" of Knightlite's First Responder Study Helper. She liked it and gave me a CD copy of just the files she downloaded from the net(it takes forever and two days to download on our station's dial-up connection) . I then called Knitelite to buy the program and was yelled at (literally) by "James" for "stealling" and "bootlegging" his software. He hung up on me twice and no amount of effort at a progessional dialog was productive. He litterally would not stop yelling long enough to listen.

It's not like we tried to "bootleg" anything. My only error was calling this individual and trying to pay him money for his product.

What I never got to tell him was that my student had complained of numerous errors in the product's answers, several of which she showed me.

I am wondering what experiences others have had with this outfit.

[FF1118]

We use FireHouse Software and haven't had much of a problem with it since I learned how to use it.

[Knightlite]

Wow, I'm James and I don't remember that. We don't yell at customers or anyone else for that matter. Our customers are very important to us, and we make extraordinary efforts to help them out whenever we can.

We are a small company in Connecticut and offer unlimited toll free tech support between 8:00 AM and 8:00 PM eastern time. We give immediate help to our customers with interface instruction, installation, study techniques, and backup of study materials. We pride ourselves on our immediate, friendly and courteous service. We also listen to our customers and incorporate many of their suggestions into our products.

Are we perfect? No. Working 12 to 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 17 years, you are bound to have an off day, but I don't remember yelling at anyone.

This post goes all the way back to 2003, which is before we took measures to protect our software from piracy. Before then, our software was so pirated that it almost was not worth staying in business. As a small company, we spend thousands of hours writing questions and creating user interfaces that help make our customers excel on their promotional and certification exams. You can't afford to keep creating great software products for Firefighters, EMTs, and Paramedics if people are not willing to pay for them. Look at some of the posts on this forum. You will see people looking for installation codes for our products.

As for numerous errors in our software, that is just not true. You can't stay in business by giving your customers misinformation. I am not saying we have never made a mistake. We are human, but any mistake in a question or answer is normally found within the first month of release and we immediately correct the problem and offer users a corrected database update. Again, our customers and the quality of our product is our highest priority. Mistakes are not tolerated at Knightlite. Sometimes local protocols don't match up with one of our questions. That is why each of our questions has a page reference to the targeted text where the customer and see where we derived the question. We have to be perfect.

Posting this attack on our company is not only unfair to us, but it is giving an incorrect assessment of the way we do business. That not only hurts my company, but also hurts our potential customers who would greatly benefit from our products.

James Redway
Founder and CEO
Knightlite Software LLC
Since 1996

[FyredUp]

James, since the incident took place over 10 years ago I would be surprised if you remembered it.

So at this point who knows what the entire truth is and frankly who cares? This post was long buried until you dug it up and posted to it. So now you reopened the negative post to post your rebuttal to a long forgotten topic...