Understanding Mikrotik's marketing strategy

RouterOS General
1

Hello,

does anybody understand why Mikrotik’s promotional videos are created in a manner to show the company as friendly? To me it does not seem to fit into the reality. In few days I found out that Mikrotik claims it values its userbase and offers several contact and discussion possibilities, but I fail to understand why at all Mikrotik does waste ressources on all of it as well as the goals seem unclear to me as the opposite happens according to what I see.

Conclusion is sadly that Mikrotik does not value anybody or anything which of course has implications, but I would like to hear other opinions of b2b as well b2c customers about how they are satisfied with Mikrotik’s support and offer on discussion possibilities. I clearly can see pattern of bashing, silencing and other well known forms of repression of unwanted content. Thanks for any replies.

Some basic questions arise for me:

  • Why are Mikrotik devices at all sold in consumer segment if Mikrotik does not want to be on that market and is interested only in business to business relationships?
  • What is the purpose of communication options like this forum if its forum staff actually does not want to see any discussions and does not want a community to use this resource for its purpose advertised and supported by Mikrotik? Example of a mod interpreting wrongly and stating wrong statements and claming to know what is going on without to be able to reply to any on topic point and derailing thread with additional statement that users should not use forum to communicate and that keeping it secret by contacting support is the right thing to do with a final cherry to tell the user that he does not understand how a user managed to post. All I can say is what an arrogant and selfish person that must be. Then I found another thread with mikrotiks request on community to help moderate and of course I find the same mod/admin claiming he was running many forums and is experienced which actually says nothing about his competence. Same admin actually claims that this forum has no other purpose than just to project own frustration from private life or unsatisfaction onto your own customer base (b2b as well b2c).
  • What is the purpose of Mikrotik deciding to give non mikrotik employee, a community member, ability to literaly cause loss to every user on this forum? I do not get, if Mikrotik cant keep its finance in sight and has to outsource this task to non mikrotik employee then I do ask myself how Mikrotik management came to conclusion that this is the right thing instead of staying professional or simply dumping waste of ressources and concentrate more on as example non perfect quality control? Or is it the way around, Mikrotik has reached all commercial goals and wants to mock everybody by fishing them to support forum with a pretext “discussion”?
  • Why are your customers, using their paid&free products, why are they not protected in any way from inproper customer relationship or do you not consider running this forum as part of available tools for customer relationship?
2

Please do not take offence at the following…

  1. Marketing is meant to put a product/service in a favourable light to sell more of them. Some advertisers will even mislead or lie to get more sales in order to achieve market growth. It’s not wasted resources, it’s how business works. MikroTik has young and charismatic employees that are willing to promote their products in a quirky-tongue-in-cheek manner with a modern and low budget approach: social media. Like or not, self-promotion of anything is now done this way because it’s cheap. Frankly, I prefer to have it done by them for them, than by some clueless influencers/models who think everything is great because they got paid/gifted to say so. Finally, a little research should have told you that MT is not the most recommended choice for the average home user. If the product doesn’t suit your needs, why fight it ?

  2. Unless you pay for your own space, everything online is owned by some entity or another, and as such, can be moderated in ways you might not agree with - and that even includes social media. Online complaints about everything have become the bane of business owners everywhere because the world is full of unreasonable customers that no one could honestly satisfy in the first place. MT is usually very tolerant in this regard, but the moderators, as you already know, aren’t employees. Regardless, if your thread is locked/deleted when you require help, isn’t it just easier to play along and follow the rules - even if you don’t agree with them ?

IMO, your personal issues with a moderator has little to do with why you are unsatisfied with MikroTik as a whole (I am not taking sides here). Saying that MikroTik doesn’t care about anybody because you do not agree with how they run their forums/market their products is really pushing it and certainly not an objective statement - it’s just your own very biased opinion based on your personal bad experiences. I, for one, believe that “MT sucks” threads do very little in helping anyone in what is essentially a user-to-user help platform. You were actually lucky to have @Normis notice the thread you pointed to - maybe they will clone him someday… And you haven’t been using routers for long enough if you believe it’s all roses and sunshine from the top players in the consumer segment. They have become a high margin commodity and the market is only getting worse…

I do not work for MT and you can do as you wish. However, I do know that when I am really unhappy with a product or the service I received, I feel much better if I simply move on. Life is too short to get angry at such trivial matters.

3

I am sorry that your experience using the forum has not been satisfactory.

It may be advisable for you to try it for a longer time (you have been a member of the forum for approximately 24 hours) to see if your experience improves.

Forum can provide useful share of experiences with another MikroTik users

4

@moba thanks for your reply and sharing your understanding about marketing. My question was not related in direction “Why does marketing lie”, if one studied ever properly marketing then one needs to know that there as practically no law which forbids promoting something which can be wrongly interpreted, by that you can claim about your product whatever you want. My point about the question is different. Promotional videos can just promote correctly, getting new customers believing in X just to see immediate effect of Y is at lest in my opinion bad marketing. I can sell you a shampoo claiming that it helps your hair growth if I can prove that one person out of X people in some test somewhere had 1 pin growth in 10 years instead of catching mikrotik on promoting being friendly just to immediately find out that it is not the case. Here again I clearly see b2b practice and b2c is left in the dark, but it is mikrotik which shoots into own foot by that because b2c customer can send device back within 14 days after the order (at least that is the case for many countries in western hemisphere) which is more than enough for normal Joe to feel “duped”. From B2B perspective it is simply not professional to promote something which so obviously is not the case. Thats why I asked, I fail to understand some decision which lead and keep this same status.

Your comment about my personall issues is not appropriate as I have no personal issues, it is Mikrotik’s issue of how they handle their own userbase which is ugly again from perspective of somebody who might be just looking how mikrotik runs customer relationship and lets random people just delete messages of their customers and by any b2b means, typing a message does take time and time costs money, by that Mikrotik shows how it wastes money of their customers.

Thanks for the input and your opinion.

@chechito
I do not know why, but I believe you are honest and that it is not nice to see people having bad experience where you are partially responsible for content. That is very positive in my eyes. Point about 24 hours might be correct, but I dedicated this weekend for this task and my calender got free for the weekend as I canceled my testing of a device which was suggested to me as replacement in one of our companies, I lost interest in it. Maybe my developer nature prevents me to have “Let me beg for help” conversations, hope you boys and girls can make something positive out of this whole mess of “discussion” forum and if you expect professionals in public, then maybe you should concentrate on communities like stack exchange and similar, there no noobs will come accross flashing their b(.)(.)bs.

Another problem for the wish to use it longer is my impression proven by statements of another admin here that you guys do not want it at all. Your another admin even insults indirectly claiming about a user to be stupid and unable to make posts, with threats he thinks to make a difference. I had one day and few posts to find out that at least one admin is working in not for me acceptable manner and that other admins nor mikrotik seems to have problem with it implicating that there are much more users and admins with same tick, its just statistics that do not lie and one can form them as wished.

Thank you for your reply and have a nice evening, I will have to leave for tonight.

5

You’ve singled me out for scorn when the only post I “repressed” was a near-duplicate made to another thread. Squishing and merging duplicates is one of the main reasons we have moderators here in the first place.

Every one of your other posts were deleted by someone else. (And no, I’m not telling you who.)


a mod interpreting wrongly

Surprise: we mods are human.

What’d I get wrong today? Be specific.

Second surprise: I will likely be wrong again tomorrow. Sorry; way it is.

Find me a perfect man, and you can have them replace me.


derailing thread

Your complaints had nothing to do with the thread’s topic, but you believe I was the one who derailed the thread, sent it off on an unrelated topic? I was trying to be helpful and informative. Would you have preferred that I leave you in the dark?


users should not use forum to communicate

I did not say that. I said that this forum was not set up for communicating to MikroTik employees. You’re free to try, but it’s a waste of your time. You seem very wrapped up in that, and here I am, helpfully directing you to a channel more likely to get you the help you want. That’s not me giving you my personal opinion in that matter. If you search this forum, you’ll find MikroTik employees saying this, repeatedly.


a final cherry to tell the user that he does not understand how a user managed to post.

You’re completely misinterpreting that statement. I was expressing my lack of knowledge of things I was in no position to observe firsthand and have not found recorded in a log; that’s it. I wasn’t watching when you posted, and I wasn’t in the other mods’ minds when they chose to let your posts through. All I know is that it got through. I was not denigrating your forum posting abilities. Relax.


what an arrogant and selfish person that must be.

I try to be humble, as you see in my expression of ignorance above. You don’t get to objective truths by starting with arrogance, and I’m a scientific kind of guy.

Selfish, now, that’s plain wrong, entirely lacking in face value. I spend a good chunk of my day moderating this forum, keeping spam and duplicates out, writing responses I intend to be helpful, posting articles on my site, even writing software and building RouterOS-compatible containers from time to time, all for free.

What valuable improvements have you made to the RouterOS world since arriving?

6

TL;DR.

Do you still have a real technical problems (e.g. “Issues with DFS and low performance with voiding CAC channels”)?
Did upgrading to 7.12rc1, as suggested, help?
Do you have your specific country set in the Wi-Fi settings as that effects how DFS/frequencies work?

Otherwise, the OP diatribes are close enough to spam IMO.

7

(3th moderator in this thread …sweet !)

@mikrotix:
A lot of misunderstanding could be clarified if you finally are willing to comprehend this is a USER forum.
Hosted by Mikrotik, yes.
Some staff members do visit this place from time to time, yes.
But this place is mainly for USERS helping other USERS. To offload support team for basic questions which can be handled by anyone having some experience with MT devices.

If you want direct interaction with MT staff, use support channel. And then most likely you can wait a bit.
If you still want more direct responses, hire a certified consultant.
Lists are available on MT website.
Your choice.

As far as I know most (all ?) moderators here are not on Mikrotik-payroll and are maintaining this place as good or as bad as possible in their own free time.
Voluntarily ! Let that part sink in, please.
So (at the risk of sounding rude, since you seem to have very long toes) it would be nice if you consider this context when you write your posts and complaints.
There are members with a “manual” when considering their style of communication, I agree, but most here are quite friendly and usually WILLING to help others.

About this particular thread:
You start with a title about marketing strategy of Mikrotik but all you do is complain how bad you feel you are being treated here.
Nobody can know how you feel but I suppose most here are adults and if you have a problem with the way things are being said to you, then why are you still here ?

PS since you keep mentioning the language issue:
for MOST of us, English is not our native language either, same for me (natively Dutch speaking but fluent in English and French, I understand bit of German as well).
Obviously there are members who make it a habit to insert some “tongue in cheek” comments from time to time but those are rarely meant to hurt someone, usually those are made with good intentions. To have some fun.
And then it might be you don’t get the hidden meaning because of the language difference.
Keep that in mind too when you interpret some communication which you classify as being rude. It might not be intended that way but you perceive it as such.

8

I think that by choosing that username and no matter how verbose and tenacious he is in continuing these complaints, he does it on purpose.
So: don’t waste your time. If she wanted to understand she had already understood.

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@mikrotix

I think there’s a language barrier making dialogue difficult. I just tried to point out that marketing is a tool that may or may not reflect actual client experience - because you started a thread that seemed to claim that MT has bad marketing/they don’t care about anyone because your own customer expectations weren’t met. Again, I do not work for MT, but I am sure you can contact them directly with your concerns.

And I didn’t mean to insult you by claiming that you have personal issues (that language thing) - simply that you are basing your assessment of a whole company/community on your bad experiences with a single individual and/or product - I still think that it was a misunderstanding (<-- personal issue WITH someone) that was blown out of proportion.

None of the regulars here are paid, yet they all donate their time because they are passionate about their gear and are happy to share their (extensive) knowledge to help new users. Moderators have reached out to you and Amm0 has offered to help you…

Expect the best out of people, not the worse. Peace.

10

Hello @Amm0,

Edited post included information for which you ask, it was reproducable on factory, 7.11 and 7.12rc1. And yes, country tests included setting the country.
I never had technical problems, if taken strictly, it was software problem which I resolved and resolution had no connection to closing the thread.
Despite that it is offtopic here and according thread is closed without my intention to reopen it, your closing sentence is of provocative nature, despite of all that I thank you for asking as I believe your intention of commenting was to help and not to impress with closing sentence.

As I replied to your question, do you have any input which would be ontopic in current thread? Even if not, thanks for contribution.

11

Hello @rextended,

sad to see such comments from somebody who is a member since 2014 and spent so much time creating so many posts. I have no clue what actually your purpose or intention is/was to comment here, admins here love to explain users how to behave, as far as I could read, you were admin and something went wrong, you wrote something about redit but I am sorry, I am not up to date about that storry or reasons why your reply in general seems to me paranoid. If you make conspiracy theories, I am wrong person to listen to it. I get a feeling you contributed to current hostile culture here according to those few topics which I read on this forum, of course I might be wrong, but you do not look like willing to contribute at all, I do not why, but I think you are hurt by something that happened, is my impression correct?

However, despite the offtopic nature of your post I at least will try to find one positive thing about your post which would be no need to open a thread to suggest you creating own git (unless you want to host it by mickey soft on github) or any other way of simple management, versioning and maintenance of all your script. Thread where you sample them is good, but if you wrote those scripts then it would be in my opinion good to manage it better/elsewhere, not on forum. I am quite sure that you are familiar with git and you do not need tips/helps in actually keeping old scripts even those not working on latest versions in one place where you easily can or not offer support, including other users who might help. Mikrotik could offer ressources for your script library if it should be self hosted.

As last, I guess you like my username :slight_smile:, hehe. As a cat you should not worry about pandas, we do not eat meat.

Have a nice day.

12

Hello Moba,

thanks for reply and as first, in no way I felt offended by your post/statement, thank you for contribution. I will have to leave for few hours and probably will be able to reply to you in extended way as well as I will reply to @holvoetn, his post includes simply more information and would take too much time to reply now, I will be back home in one or two hours, but for the meantime, why do you assume at all that I was not in contact with Mikrotik representatives including the fact that this discussion is not related to Mikrotik’s reply?

See you later.

13

Hello @holvoetn,

To be honest, I do not feel honored, I actually find that this is a problem and trying to talk here seems only in spam accusations. I will take as example extended who in other threads even made calculations on how many users here are, how many are active, how many posts are there etc… , but fails totaly to address the issue and if taking statistics then extended is one if not top spammer of this forum (letting everybody free room for definition of a spammer), resulting marking every new member as spam/bot/troll/… until member has proven that this is not the case. In fact, it is very obvious that there are double standards due to mikrotik not being able to adapt properly to times in which they live and effectively fight spam, bots and so on… . So many here run on high horse suggesting everybody to get training or consultation, but what about Mikrotik, why does not Mikrotik get consulting in that topic?

Maybe one of my impressions is wrong, but from statistics 3rd one who is friendly overweights one friendly and one unfriendly admin. That of course by not judging other comments unconnected to my username.

Same question to you, why do you assume that I was not in contact with Mikrotik regarding this question?

Your explanation of people doing friendly charity is sadly not what I would call it from own experience, taking other threads results in even worse conclusion. I think it is obsolete to explain that I know that you are not paid, that is by far not the reason the break competence level of the moderation and administration in form of attacking and insulting new users. Why do not you simply close registration for new users if you do not wish to have new users at all who might or might not meet your criteria in communication capabilities?

On other side, you do expect to be respected for your time and efforts, which only says that you value yourself as if you do not value yourself nobody will. Respect your users, let them free room for expression, do not educate adults on manners and do not think you are a judge if interpretation of your expectations and rules is differently interpreted due to a nature of double standars and not holding at all on own set rules, by that, how do you expect a new user to show you required respect for your time if you delete his time by deleting a post for which a user spent time? If it is one of 1000 users than it is enough reasons to search for flaws, what I see here is the opposite and so often new users get mocked in really inappropriate manner.

In fact it is not different than in real life, respect other people, even if it is a user with one post.

All of current post is connecting in one or another way to marketing which would be ontopic here.

Thanks for reaching out and have and nice evening.

14

The lack of [extensive] marketing (and end-user centric features) is a feature, not a bug. It’s pretty simple they leave that profit margin to their partners, who employ their own marketing (and testing/engineering) in exchange for lower unit-cost. I doubt Mikrotik is losing large orders because of forum moderation. And your complaints about that seem overblown, but that’s just my opinion.

You seem passionate about something… But I’m with @tangent, I like data. As a new forum contributor, you may not know you can start a poll on whatever you’re proposing. We can all see how the community responds to whatever you think needs changing.

15

Hello @tangent,

You’ve singled me out for scorn when the only post I “repressed” was a near-duplicate made to another thread. Squishing and merging duplicates is one of the main reasons we have moderators here in the first place.

You now claim that something is near-duplicate, how and when did it turn from duplicate to near-duplicate? What is the difference if not your subjective assumption? I guess you want to educate me on reasons why moderators exist and you will explain that it is not to entertain users, right?

Every one of your other posts were deleted by someone else. (And no, I’m not telling you who.)

That is again wrong implication on your side, once again you insert/change something, this time you implicate that I would ask who it was without to elaborate why I would request it if a person who did is incapable of leaving a notice or at least get into contact on the issue? It is repressive, but even asking a user to change content is way better than to decide to delete somebodies time and it does not matter what your subjective impression of it is.

Surprise: we mods are human.

Repeating same mistake over and over is not a sign of humanity, it is a sign of ignorance and inability to learn from mistake and achievements. Tolerance has its borders too which is again subjective, my tolerance level regarding not learning from mistakes is as you can witness way lower than what it seems you are used to on this forum. Is it my fault?

What’d I get wrong today? Be specific.

Second surprise: I will likely be wrong again tomorrow. Sorry; way it is.

I would have replied to this question, but then already in next comment you reply to yourself making your question cynical as you are not interested in the answer and the only logical explanation is that pretend something and show at the same time arrogance in claiming: “Second surprise: I will likely be wrong again tomorrow. Sorry; way it is.”

Find me a perfect man, and you can have them replace me.

I felt that you are frustrated for some reason but was not aware it is of sexual nature. There are plenty of dating sites, maybe you should try them?

Your complaints had nothing to do with the thread’s topic, but you believe I was the one who derailed the thread, sent it off on an unrelated topic? I was trying to be helpful and informative. Would you have preferred that I leave you in the dark?

You clearly have troubles in interpretation. Your post there was offtopic and rude and that as admin, of course you derailed it and if talking about manners, lastly normis already got into that topic trying to elaborate the issue, but you were not capable to do so, instead you decided to try to degrade a user and were unfriendly clearly overstepping trust and competence given to you with extending your user account with additional privileges.

I did not say that. I said that this forum was not set up for communicating to MikroTik employees. You’re free to try, but it’s a waste of your time. You seem very wrapped up in that, and here I am, helpfully directing you to a channel more likely to get you the help you want. That’s not me giving you my personal opinion in that matter. If you search this forum, you’ll find MikroTik employees saying this, repeatedly.

Oh I see, you do not like if other people interpret or feel differently than you do? Helpfull? I guess we interpret “help” also differently. Once again you write assumption that I was trying to communicate with mikrotik employees, why do you try contstantly to inject ideas/statements from your imagination which never took place? Why at all was you directing me to any channels if in that thread it was clear what the discussion is about and it was not about your complexes, it was about mikrotik’s wireless product, why did you not try to elaborate ontopic? You had better things to do.

You’re completely misinterpreting that statement. I was expressing my lack of knowledge of things I was in no position to observe firsthand and have not found recorded in a log; that’s it. I wasn’t watching when you posted, and I wasn’t in the other mods’ minds when they chose to let your posts through. All I know is that it got through. I was not denigrating your forum posting abilities. Relax.

I am sorry, but you again give a fault to me for bad interpretation of your questionable expression. I have read it once again and you clearly expressed in way which I understood. It can be interpreted in many ways, but your intentions were seems only clear to you.

Selfish, now, that’s plain wrong, entirely lacking in face value. I spend a good chunk of my day moderating this forum, keeping spam and duplicates out, writing responses I intend to be helpful, posting articles on my site, even writing software and building RouterOS-compatible containers from time to time, all for free.

It is highly trustable if a person claims about itself how good and clever “I” am, right :slight_smile: . I am not in position to judge how you spent your free time and if it helped anybody, it clearly sounds like that you seek for recognition and get angry if it is not projected, I am sorry, but that is your personal problem.

What valuable improvements have you made to the RouterOS world since arriving?

If I would tell you the impact of my work, you would not believe in which ways and how it influenced/helped not just RouterOS :slight_smile:. But this last quote shows your face and that you lied several times in this short conversation with me, I will spare you the blame to point it out as it is not in my interest to waste more time explaining something that you should already know. BTW, last quote makes it obvious that following is a lie: “You’re completely misinterpreting that statement. I was expressing my lack of knowledge”

Thank you for the attempt to elaborate, sadly my impression of you being arogant and selfish is now only stronger, just keep second surprise valid :wink: and everything will be fine :slight_smile:

16



Life is like a box of routers. You never know what you’re gonna get. That’s all I have to say about that. :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

17

Finally we are getting into right direction with this thread, thank you for that.

You simplyfied this business concept a lot. I did not make any comments about profits, orders, margins, … . Maybe starting with very simple questions can lead to productive outcome. When you watch promtional videos, do they cause a feeling in you like “to trust”, “friendly”; “nice” or anything else?

So many posts here and one thing is still unclear to me. On one side I personally was told to be more professional etc… and can consider myself lucky if a post goes through but then in discussions here I get replies “we are humans too”, “we are doing it for free”, “using our free time”, … . In fact it is a total chaos, contradictions and double standards. It is unclear if this forum is for everybody, community or only for professional certified network engineers. All of this leads to what it is and everybody gets offeneded due to already mentioned business model as so many here are connected to the brand “Mikrotik” and some might be even dependant.

Do you share the opinion of another admin that users should not come to the forum for discussion but instead write only to support? Here as example I fail to understand marketing goals especially since forum is a tool for used for customer relationship, it is Mikrotik’s community. All in all for normal Joe it already means that Mikrotik, even if bought by mistake, will be sent back because most are kinky about contacting support for each dumb question, especially when it is “discussion” related and the best answer which you would get is to ask on forums and when you get there to ask it, you get educated by who knows who about why moderation exists, what rules of communication are, how restricted you are in expression and so on… resulting in a user waisting ton of time just to get its message deleted.

In my first post I already put a question, if Mikrotik did reach all commercial goals? That question is relevant.

Your comment about poll, well, I guess you want me get banned for using this forums tools, since if I create a pool for anything, some random charity worker will appear lecturing on my unprofessionallity and that it is actually spam, I will be told to be more professional and if I complain I will be told as excude “we are humans too”. Thanks for suggestion.

18

Finally somebody with some sense of humor