>I must relate a story about how "great" COTS software is...
When I worked for Boeing, we were a Microsoft shop. Now, Boeing is big,
real big - >100,000 employees.
Anyway, we needed to send some reports to the Air Force, and they needed to
be in PowerPoint. (yes, i know).
Sometimes when the reports were sent, they would show up as all
black. After MUCH testing and troubleshooting, we got it figured out to a
different graphic DLL in Windows 9x and Windows NT. The PowerPoint slides
worked fine if they were saved on an NT box - but not on a 9x box.
We talked with Microsoft and informed them of this bug. They verified that
what we found out was correct and that they were going to have a meeting to
see what the plan of action was going to be.
They met, and came back to us with. "Yes, we know it is a bug - but no we
are not going to fix it." That was that - even though I am sure Microsoft
has made BILLIONS from Boeing, they just didn't care enough to fix a known
problem.
I was not surprised, but not happy. In the end, we ended up making a VB app
that would open the file and then save the file. This would fix the error
as long as it was run on an NT box. I used Perl to glue it all together
and made it an automated web app.
Anyway, just because software is made from a well-known company, and even
if your company is a HUGE customer of theirs - you are really S.O.L. if
they choose not to fix it.
Had this been Open Source, we would have fixed the problem ourselves....
-Brent
