Thoughts of a leaving enthusiast

This will be my last post on this forum. For as long as this remains visible, I’d like to leave a few thoughts for consideration. This is, after all, a public forum.

First, I would encourage Alta Labs to consider having someone other than the CTO serve as the primary liaison on the forum. Too often, discussions that could be productive end up feeling adversarial. Most people come here looking for help, clarification, or a place to share concerns. When those concerns are met with defensiveness rather than curiosity, it discourages participation and undermines the value of the community.

Second, I would encourage some reflection on what it means to “listen to customers.” I was here for the AP6-Pro launch and the extensive feedback regarding the mounting design. I was also here for the AP7-Pro release, which retained many of the same characteristics that users had criticized. Likewise, requests for software rollback capabilities and improved configuration backup have been recurring topics for years.

The issue is not whether every request should be implemented. No company can do that. The issue is whether customers can see evidence that their feedback is genuinely influencing priorities and product decisions. From the perspective of many forum participants, that connection is often difficult to see.

If the intention is to engage with customers, then engagement needs to be more than collecting feedback—it needs to include demonstrating that feedback is being considered and acted upon. Otherwise, the forum risks becoming less of a customer community and more of a place where users talk among themselves while waiting for decisions that seem disconnected from the discussions happening here.

I probably should have moved on a long time ago, but before doing so, I wanted to leave these observations for whatever value they may have to those willing to consider them.

I agree. I was surprised to see the new AP7 access points using the same mount, albeit made from a different material. We were led to believe that a different, easier-to-use mount was in the works.

In one of the videos an installer released, you can see that every crew member is struggling to mount them.

I was also shocked to see that Alta-MikeD had his account suspended and marked as offboarding. MikeD was very helpful and receptive to feedback. I see other topics pointing out issues to Alta, and instead of providing a fix, the responses seem to be explanations or excuses.

Take the User/Password/Private Key clear text in /cfg/config.json topic, for example. Saying that “someone would need to have administrator access to the device already” is shocking. Countless vulnerabilities have been patched after being identified, even when administrator access was already required to exploit them.

I think Alta needs to step back, lower its defensive tone, and be more receptive to questions and suggestions.