Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!XENURUS.GOULD.COM!preece%vger From: preece%vger@XENURUS.GOULD.COM (Scott E. Preece) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: dozing vendor Message-ID: <8810031512.AA18608@vger> Date: 3 Oct 88 15:12:48 GMT Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 53 > In article <22992@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> you write: > >I just got off the phone from a conversation with a technical support > >representative of a vendor of software that runs on workstations. I'm > >pretty amazingly frustrated, so I thought I'd share it with y'all :-) > > > > ... > >Has anyone else encountered this sort of situation? Have you had any > >luck inducing motion? Can you share your technique with us? Any > >suggestions, other than gnawing on the telephone handset and banging > >on my keyboard? > > From: emcard!stiatl!pda@gatech.edu (Paul Anderson) > 1) Indicate that you are going to post their name to the network for bad... > 2) Find another vendor (of anything) and pull out their business card... > 3) Order equipment from another vendor and make sure your troublemaker... > 4) Stop payments on any invoices, threatening to return existing ... > > Personally, I would like to see you post the vendors name, as I am an > X User and I want to stay away from vendors that don't believe that the > customer is Number One. If nothing else, these newsgroups are capable > of being (and have been) the Consumer Reports of the computer industry. ---------- You guys are being pretty hard on a vendor for not be willing to ship something based on non-final versions of X. People who sell software like to have happy customers; as a group they don't usually come home from sales meetings saying "Wow, I really put it to those guys today..." MOST customers want stable, solidly supported products. Universities are a very special case, often willing to take interim versions because they want to be at the leading edge and because they have students around who like to play with things. Most commercial customers would not want to buy software that (a) was built on an interim release of X and (b) had to run on a non-supported server. The earlier release that ran on v10 in all probability (1) was begun when they thought v10 would be the real thing, (2) was done as an in-house exercise, and (3) was made available to those customers who really wanted it ( possibly with a warning that it was a preliminary version?) because it was recognized that v11 was going to be a long way away. Software vendors hate with a passion having to do work over again; they would rather spend their dollars on producing the next generation of the product than on upgrading the internals because there's a new release of X. I'd say your vendor was (1) unusually honest, (2) unusually sensible, and (3) doing the right thing for the bulk of the customer base. The Sun server isn't that far way now; once it's out, ask your vendor again when they will have support for X11; I suspect they'll have an answer then. -- scott preece gould/csd - urbana uucp: uunet!uiucuxc!urbsdc!preece arpa: preece@Gould.com