Mavis Beacon

Broderbund Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 16 - For Windows or Mac
$29.95
I bot this for my 8yo daughter. She is doing great and enjoying it except for a program glitch: it doesn't advance properly - every 3rd or 4th lesson the program gives a lesson that includes all letters on the keyboard; as I saw in some reviews - you can get through the 'advanced' lesson and then it returns to a proper progression, BUT - it keeps doing this every 3rd or 4th lesson which is a real pain. Other reviews that I've looked up elsewhere (not just Amazon) say that the company acknowledges the problem but calls it 'minor'. I guess that means they don't think it important enough to fix. It is a very inconvenient problem in the program. Putting the glitch another way: you learn, say - 10 keys - then the next lesson will have all 26 letters in the lesson assuming you've learned all 26 when you've only learned 10 - you get past this lesson and it goes back to teaching you keys 11 & 12, you practice 12 keys for a couple of lessons - then the next lesson has the whole keyboard on it once again, and this repeats time and again. We're giving up and buying our 3rd typing program hoping it will work. (The first we tried, Typing Instructor for Kids - didn't advance at all - she learned the home keys and then it stayed on the home keys forever not advancing to other keys - aahh! - We just want to learn to type!). We will try "Typing Quick & Easy" this time.

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing Platinum 20
$29.99
How could Broderbund, a company that has been in business for quite some time, release a hugely buggy software without testing? I am not talking about some hard to find bug. I am talking that if you start learning the lesson as a beginning user, you can only go as far as learning the 'e' and 'i' keys. What is that? After that, the sequence of lessons gets totally messed up. Broderbund's support website acknowledges the problem but offered no patch. Their workaround fails too. There is also another bug. It says that the next lesson will be so and so, but the next lesson winds up being something else.

I contacted Broderbund yesterday (2009.10.11) and so far no response. True, their support email does state to allow 48 business hours for a response. Let us translate that into human speak. 48 business hours means well over a week, 6 business days. I would expect even better response time from a single person software company just starting off, not a well known software company, whose software sells in real stores.

--

2009.10.21 Update: I finally received a response after about nine days to my original complaint. Here is the reposne that I received from Broderbund Software:

"Thank you for contacting Broderbund Software, brought to you by Encore.

We apologize for the delay in responding to your email. We are experiencing a higher than usual number of emails. Because your email exceeds 2 business days, we are closing your email case. If you have not received a suffient response and still require our assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us."

Nice people. He? What does 'Because your email exceeds 2 business days' mean anyways? Are they saying that because they did not respond to my original email in over nine days, that they will close my email ticket.

What a cool concept. They get money, have a non-working product, provide no support of any kind, and collect money. Furthermore, they ship buggy software to stores for other people to buy.

Score: Pathetic, truly pathetic.

Mavis Beacon Typing for Kids
$29.95
This product should no longer be sold as it takes an out of date operating system to work. This iformation was not disclosed in the online description and I did not find this out until I opened it which means that now I can not send it back.

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing Deluxe 17 [OLD VERSION]
$39.95
Looking at the reviews,my problem is not a rare occurrence.i received this cd-rom software that was defective. I emailed them 3 times but never got a response. they only responded after a complaint was put through amazon. I wouldn't buy anything else from oc tech.