RE: Food for Thought

<< If a customer is paying such maintenance and only calls the support
center
once then either they are:
- not taking advantage of all the tools at their disposal
- underutilizing the asset and not pushing the envelope
- getting ready to switch to another product and do not want to know that
this package would do it, if they only asked.>>

You forgot one: The system does exactly what they bought it for, and don't
care about what else it can do. There are lots of those customers out there.
I even have one customer who doesn't even have a VPN connection to his
machine. I connect via the internal PPP modem.

Mark Shearer still owes me a thousand bucks.

Paul Nelson
Office 512-392-2577
Cell 708-670-6978
nelsonp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of rob@xxxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 1:44 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: RE: Food for Thought

Define "customer". Is a customer someone who purchased a product 10 years
ago, was told that if they wanted upgrades in the future they would have
to pay an annual maintenance contract but decided not to and now wants the
upgrade for nothing including no back maintenance? So, why should they be
treated better than someone who paid the maintenance religiously? For
example, if I run up a huge cell phone bill and decide I can't pay should
it be the cell phone companies responsibility to renegotiate with me and
write off some of the debt while not throwing rebates routinely at the
customers who pay their bills on time?

Now, there's some argument in your favor for those cases where someone is
paying their maintenance on time but simply want to upgrade their hardware
to a comparable, but newer box and the vendor wants more than a token
license transfer fee.

If a customer is paying such maintenance and only calls the support center
once then either they are:
- not taking advantage of all the tools at their disposal
- underutilizing the asset and not pushing the envelope
- getting ready to switch to another product and do not want to know that
this package would do it, if they only asked.

I consider the week lost if I don't open up a pmr with IBM.

Rob Berendt