Stuck trying to download "VMware Fusion Pro for Personal Use"?

Here is how I got past "Account verification is Pending. Please try after some time."

There is much to say about the Broadcom website and the support experience they offer but I’ll leave that for some other time. Just let me reassure you: no, it’s not you who is stupid or anything. The Broadcom website is one of the worst corporate websites out there. (You thought the VMware website was bad before Broadcom acquired it? Well, Broadcom managed to make it worse. Much worse.

But that’s not what I’m here to write today. I just wanted to post my solution for a problem that many people seem to be experiencing, this:

So, you’ve created an account on the Broadlink website and you managed to find the page where you can download VMware Fusion Pro for Personal Use, you can’t actually download it quite yet. You need to enter your address first. After that you get diverted to other pages about building a profile and what not, so you need to find your way back to that page. If you’re lucky, you will be able to download the software and carry on with your life.

But if you’re unlucky, you just get the above error message. No Download. Nada.

Well, the solution is hidden on a knowledge base article that they created just for that error message:

The important part is at the very bottom. No, not the feedback thing. The part that says that you must not use any “special characters” (I read this as “non-ASCII” characters). If your address contains any such characters, that is likely the reason why your account is not getting “verified” (and probably never will). Or perhaps you forgot to fill in one of the fields?

Long story short: the only way to fix this is to create a new account with a different email address and fill in your address again, but with ASCII characters only. This is what the support agent told me when I finally got an answer.

This is the information you need to finally download your personal copy. But unless you are no longer surprised by any nonsense from Broadcom, you might be wondering: why can’t I just clean my address and resubmit the verification request? Why a new account?

Well, I’m glad you asked. The reason is this:

Note that this is a screenshot of a knowledge base article whose original purpose was to explain how important it is to keep your account data up-to-date and how to do that, but now it’s main purpose is to tell people that what the page explains is currently not possible because something is broken.

Since I already had an (expired) trial version installed which was asking me to enter the free personal license code, I asked the support agent whether they could supply me with such a code. The answer was that those codes no longer exist. I asked whether they could fix the address for me. The answer was that they couldn’t.

So, in summary, here is what Broadcome managed to accomplish:

• they abolished free license codes for personal use and are instead asking users to download what seems to be a special (or personalized?) version of the software,

• but in order to dowload that, you need to provide your address using ASCII characters only. The form where you enter your address doesn’t say anything about the ASCII limitation, though,

• so when users use non-ASCII characters, the “verification” process fails. But instead of telling the user that it failed, they are told that it is “Pending” and that you’re supposed to try again “after some time”. (No comment on that wording.)

• Rather than fixing any of the above, a new knowledge base article is created for those users stubborn and creative enough to find that article using various seaerch strategies. The article directs users to Broadcom support to resolve this.

• But those who manage to get past the insanely slow and dumb (even by pre-ChatGPT standards) virtual assistant to get connected to a real person will have to wait around half an hour before they get any response from that person. And, no, there is nothing telling you to wait or that an agend will soon answer or anything else. There is simply no response. (The only reason I found out that there actually are real people at the other end was that I went for dinner and when I came back I found this:

  

  So, yea, when the user doesn’t respond within two minutes, it’s obviously time to close the chat and move on.

• But where was I? - Oh, yes. So, once you acually chat with a real person, they cant actually resolve the problem that the knowledge base article created specifically for that problem told you to contact support for. Instead, they direct you to another knowledge base article that informs you that their system is broken.

• It does not inform you, though, that their system is so broken, that not even their support agents can access it and fix stuff for you. So, if you, for whatever reason happened to find that knowledge base article before contacting support (perhaps because you gave up on trying to contact support and tried to find a way of fixing your address by yourself), then this page seems to imply that you need to contact support anyway, just like the first knowledge base article told you. Well, and we know where that went.

If you read this far, you are probably also fascinated by just how many mistakes a company can make and which, had they been avoided, would have significantly improved the UX in this process. I challenge you: how many small improvements/changes can you find?