When you make a mistake and order two copies of the same DVD on Amazon.com, they offer a simple refund process. Send the product back, and they effectively reverse the charge on your purchase, paying the money back to your bank account. It was with some surprise that I learned yesterday, that after spending two minutes paying VMWare $80 for their desktop product, "returning" the product when it didn't work for me was a lot more complicated.

Although I took delivery of the product by download and purchased it directly from the VMWare web site - meaning they have all the proof of purchase they need on their computer systems - VMWare requires that you print out proof of purchase and a return authorisation form and mail it to them. According to their site, when they've processed this information, possibly in 10 to 12 weeks, they will then send a refund check.

VMWare is, like most tech companies, is on Twitter these days, so I politely poked a few people there, after spending about a half hour trying to get the product to work. I was comparing VMWare Fusion with Parallels. On the same Mac Mini, VMWare did not run, it hung and had to be killed. I tried everything I could think of and searched for an answer on the web. Then I installed Parallels, which worked perfectly on the same Mac Mini. My contact began as private messages so as not to blurt out bad things about their product without cause.

Tweeting about this, one user helpfully mentioned that I should check out the community on the forums, which I certainly would have done, but it was too late to be of use, since I now had Parallels working. I wrote to VWMare about a refund and got a response within a reasonable time containing a link to the page on their site with the procedure for using the guarantee. The official @VMWareFusion answer to my refund question was "What's the issue you ran into? It substantially diverges from what the grand majority of our users experience."

While the above statement may well be true, it doesn't help me in any way or change anything for my particular problem.

About company presence on Twitter, here's my conclusion: @comcastcares has set the example in a simple, concrete behavior pattern:

Get the first 140 character message about the issue and answer it by immediately offering a direct email exchange to the customer.

I believe this VMWare issue was not handled well via Twitter, even though I did start the request using a direct private message exchange with an employee of VMWare. His whatever it takes response should have been an email or phone number to solve things quickly and without all the hoops of searching sites, filling out forms, etc. The next official company response, which was public, also missed the boat of a simple phone call and instead basically said "you're the only one having this problem".

Imagine a world where I'd be telling everyone to try both Parallels and VMWare because hey, although VMWare Fusion didn't work for me, it might be good for you and the company is a pleasure to deal with. Now look at the end reality which is that I see how unimportant an individual case is to the company. I hope VMWare can learn from this and perhaps then next individual will get better service. I also hope that individual buyers of products and services will learn that in this day and age, there's no good reason to put up with things like this, a message needs to be sent.

Update: One person I exchanged messages with on Twitter told me "No matter how much you like it, Twitter is not an online support forum. I personally don't deal with support or refunds".  The same person did howver ask me "Ping @vmwarefusion, they may be able to help". I think the bottom line here is that companies need to have a policy on social media.