On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 11:18:28AM -0800, Peter Scott wrote:
> At 10:42 AM 3/14/01 -0800, Charles Barilleaux wrote:
> >2. No company, so noone a manager can bully into adding feature (and
> >thus look important)
>
> In 20+ years in IT I have encountered exactly one vendor that was
> responsive to requests for adding new features. Responsive in the sense of
> actually implementing them, rather than making soothing noises. I have
> encountered zero vendors that responded to bullying. I wonder when
> managers will get the clue that the bullying activity serves only to vent
> their spleen and doesn't actually accomplish anything. I believe this is
> the real threat of Open Source to these guys: they would be forced into a
> model where they couldn't pretend that rude behavior would get them anywhere.
I've worked for a company who made most of its money by adding new
features to its software. It would practically give away they existing
base, but a new customer could easily end up paying > $1M in consulting
fees and enhancement requests before going live.
And yes, bullying by some clients certainly helped. If you only have a
few of them, losing even one of them is a big deal. It didn't work with
all managers, and not all clients succeeded.
As a tech person, and pronent of Open Source, I say that having the right
support contracts can be live saving. Whether it's overnight shipment of
new parts, or ftp-ing a core dump of a kernel and having the bug fixed in
the next release. Open Source is nice, but only very few companies have
the tuits and employer time to spare to actually fix bugs or add features.
Responsiveness to bugs is important - and indepent of a product being
Open Source or not.
Abigail
