Thursday, March 30, 2006

Customer

I won't tell you the name of the vendor. You've never heard of them, so it hardly matters. Names and details changed to salve my conscience.

We have a need to enable a small group of wireless clients to access an application. We're at release 6.1. To enable this costs $6,500. Per server. We own three of these servers. If you upgrade to release 6.2 the service we need is .. free. Bundled with the application.

We can't really upgrade before we need the wireless service. We really don't want to spend $2437.50 per device to enable connection.

We've been using this application for over three years. We promise to upgrade to 6.2 asap following go-live. Could the vendor give us a break and .. you know let us borrow the needed service until we upgrade.

Oh hell no. They'll rent us the service. For $4,500. Per server.

So they get nothing. We'll be aggressive, I'll pull a few late nights and loose my weekend. We can't just stop using the application - there are some serious development hours and a scripts to customize ... it's not like buying Toyota if the Lexus dealership irritates you.

But it feels wrong. 'Anally raped by monkeys wearing lemon-juice lubricated condoms' wrong. We spend hundreds of man hours installing your application, spend serious bucks for a complicated system, send guys to your training and when we need a small break THIS is what happens?

This is why thingamy is so damned attractive.

One single system to run your business.

No need for other enterprise software nor middleware.

No need for hierarchies nor information tree structures.

No need for management to run the workflow.

Enter the future at your own pace, start small or big.

Refine your business model and processes continuously.

And yes, you're not the first to utter unbelievable, bollocks, bullshit, etc. under your breath.
We like that, leaves us only one task: Prove that the system actually works.

Would that not be kind of cool if we did?
It would be all kinds of cool. Stay tuned, I've begged to be let in to the beta ....
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