KISS Technology executives in Denmark have been slammed for their failure to address problems associated with thousands of faulty of KISS Players sold in Australia prior to the company being acquired by Cisco.
Investigations by SmartHouse News have revealed that up to 70% of all KISS Technology players sold in Australia have failed. Hundreds of others shipped into Australia are lying dead in the warehouses of Melbourne based distributor Qualifi.
In Denmark, the home of KISS Technology, the company is constantly being criticised in the media. Qualifi management has had to handle constant problems with KISS management in Denmark who they claim have failed to deliver product when promised or upgrades to fix product already shipped.
In fact the problem is so bad that the new owners of KISS Technology have ordered Qualifi to not take any more products from KISS until a brand new Linksys branded player is released in the next quarter.
Investigations by SmartHouse News have revealed that of 2,000 KISS products shipped into Australia 1,100 are still at the Qualifi warehouse due to problems. Of the remainder that were shipped out to resellers more than 70% have been returned with problems.
A NSW Harvey Norman franchisee said “Taking on the KISS product was a total disaster in fact it was so bad for us that we question whether we will deal with Qualifi again over this issue. The management at KISS prior to Cisco taking over were pure bullshit artists”.
NSW based reseller Len Wallis of Len Wallis Audio said “We have had a lot of problems with the KISS Technology range of products. Of the ones we sold, most came back with problems. We had problems with the KISS DVD drive as well as with their networking configuration. During the whole process we had tremendous support from Qualifi despite the fact that Qualifi were not getting any support from the manufacturer. They were absolutely superb right down to taking product back and rebating us”.
Graeme Reardon the Regional Director for Linksys in Australia said, “These problems relate to issues and product prior to when Cisco acquired KISS Technology. Having said this we are working closely with Qualifi to resolve a lot of issues associated with KISS product in Australia”
“We have instructed Qualifi to not ship into Australia any more KISS branded products. The KISS name is being dropped and all future products will be branded Linksys.”
One of the problems for Cisco is that all of the problems relate top products manufactured by KISS Technology prior to the Cisco acquisition.
A former senior executive of KISS Technology who worked in the UK said “Nothing from KISS Technology prior to Cisco taking over really worked. A search on Google for the KISS Technology names reveals a tyranny of problems and complaints. No one in their right mind would go out and buy a KISS product that was manufactured by KISS prior to Cisco becoming involved”.
They added “Both distributors and consumers have grounds to sue the KISS Technology management who ran the company prior to Cisco getting on board. This would be a massive class action case as thousands of people around the world are suffering and they are doing nothing about it despite the fact that they made millions out of the Cisco deal”.
For several years now KISS Technology management has found themselves in hot water. Promises to deliver a new generation of plasma screens two years ago never happened despite journalists being flown to Denmark for the launch of the KISS plasma range.
On at least 3 occasions Tomas Sorenson the General Manager of International sales for KISS Technology promised me that new products shown at the International CES show in Las Vegas were about to go on sale. Nothing came of these products or of the media player technology he was selling.
Back in early 2004, MPlayer claimed that KISS Technology was violating their GPL by using parts of their MPlayer movie playback code in proprietary KISS software. The Managing Director of Kiss Technology, Peter Wilmar Christensen at the time denied all claims of wrong doing and suggested that if the pieces of code are the same, perhaps they were leaked from Kiss Technology and were then used by the MPlayer group.
Another company that was severely hurt by KISS Technology was fellow Danish Company, Jamo which launched a DVR 50 Receiver based on the Kiss Technology DP470. Jamo had so many problems with product that they not only stopped sales but ended up losing what was described as “Bucket loads of money”.
The MPC Club which is an International Community for people interested in network player similar to what KISS Technology manufacture has publicly slammed KISS Technology management.
They claim that despite numerous efforts undertaken by the MPC Club, the company still does not deliver adequate after-sales support for their products. The frustration of hundreds of consumers has been caused by the failure of the company to provide spare parts and after-sales service they claim. On their web site they describe Kiss Technology players as failure-prone products.
They claim that their members need spare parts so that people don’t have to throw away $1,500 player into the recycle bin after only a short period of time.
They say “The failure rate of the KISS Technology products is extremely high, caused by badly designed hardware (power supply) and very breakable DVD drives,” says Trippaers Ronny (Hi-Jack), founder and owner of the MPC Club Media Portal.
“It’s as if they don’t care about their customers” he said.
He added, “A simple request for information or even an update on when upgrades or fixes will be available is met with total contempt. Consumers have paid good money for their KISS product so they deserve some sort of support.
“Who would believe a company such as Cisco / Linksys is not even able to address relatively simple issues such as faulty DVD drives and power supplies causing 15% of KiSS products to fail within the first year and double that amount in the second.
“The problem should be taken very seriously at Linksys,” stated Hi-Jack. “It may not mean a dramatic revenue loss for Cisco owned Linksys as they are a big company with a lot of money. They’re just not spending any of it providing after-sales support to consumers of KiSS Technology, a company they apparently acquired having no idea of what a mess it was in when they purchased it”.
“We intend to tell thousands of our registered forum members what risks are attached to purchasing a device made or supported by Linksys. We will show them how the marketing around these products are wildly inaccurate”.
MPC Club administrators blame Linksys for not taking care of the issue once it was known. SHN has been aware of several issues in Australia relating to KISS Technology players. At one stage we were told that the KISS DP600 player had been launched. We were then told that it had been recalled. Calls to various resellers revealed that several of them were holding KISS tDP600 in stock waiting for spare parts. In the end Qualifi did the right thing and took the stock back despite no support from KISS Technology management.
A senior Cisco executive in the US told SHN that Cisco were well aware of the issues associated with KISS Technology.
“During the next week I believe that several decisions will be made that will affect distributors as well as KISS Technology. A lot of people are working on the problems associated with this acquisition which has been a problem child since the acquisition last year. A lot of the problems relate to business decisions that were made prior to Cisco buying the company.”
