ssdbruce@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Bruce Crabtree) (08/15/90)
In article <140565@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>: > G O D I R E C T L Y T O T H E V E N D O R > >What part of the previous line don't you understand? Going to the vendor is fine, if they can about their product. Unfortunately there are vendors out there (even big ones) that only care about a sale. Disclaimer: The following happend about five years ago when I was working for a different company. Perhaps the vendor has changed their ways. A project I was on had problems with a Pascal compiler and linker for a Development System. For three years we debugged their compiler and fought with their linker. (We weren't able to use the debugger we purchased it didn't work on anthing bigger that 200-300 lines). That`s three years of trouble reports, phone calls to local offices, phone calls to the main office (Beaverton, OR), meetings with the customer service engineers, and meetings with salesmen. Due to the lack of support we were forced to come up with our own work arounds. (But we got pretty good at it :-) ). As you might guess only two updates were issued to us in those three years. The linker update fixed one of three problems we had and the compiler update did not fix any of our problems. Of course after the first year we started letting others in the company know about our problems. Finally when our recommendations blocked a large purchase from their company, they sent the sales manager for the western United States to talk with us. He wanted us to recommed their products for other groups in our company. When we explained about the lack of support we had received, he remarked, "If you are not going to buy more of our products, we are not going to provide support for the ones you have." You can imagine how the meeting went after that and what our recommendation was. This was a case of a vendor not caring about supporting a product and the marketplace responding. The incident did teach me not to believe everything a salesman or a sales brochure. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Bruce Crabtree ssdbruce@jarthur.claremont.edu Software Systems Design, Inc [W] 1-714-624-2306 Claremont, CA -- -------------------------------------------------------------------- Bruce Crabtree ssdbruce@jarthur.claremont.edu Software Systems Design, Inc [W] 1-714-624-2306 Claremont, CA [H] 1-714-738-6026